Fine tune your fascia for improvements to proprioception and pain!

Want to improve your coordination? Become a better dancer? Move with ease and grace? Reduce pain?

Enhancing the communication between your fascia and your brain holds many keys to the improvement of this. And just about anyone can take some easy steps to improve the condition of their fascia!

Turn disorganised fascia into beautifully organised and well-functioning fascia.

Fascia is that semi-transparent film which wraps around every grouping of cells in your body: from muscles to organs, all are sheathed in a thin but very tough layer of fascia (it looks a bit like hazy clingfilm).

Fascia is incredibly important for our sense of proprioception.  So, if you want to improve your ability to know where your own body is in space, then fascia is a great place to start….and the brain is a great place to end, and begin again, because the communication between brain and body is constant!

Incredibly, the density of nerve endings in the fascia is around three times higher, as compared to the density of nerve endings in the muscles. The muscles relate to action, movement, and doing; and signals come OUT of the brain to make this muscle movement happen. The fascia is predominantly about information coming IN to the brain about what is going on.  The 1:3 ratio of muscle nerve endings to fascia nerve endings indicates just how valuable information about our own body at any given moment seems to be. In fact, some studies estimate there are up to six to ten times the density of nerves in fascia as compared to muscles!

And it is not just the fascia-to-muscle ratio which is of note: fascial expert Prof Robert Schleip writes that “the estimated number of nerve endings in the body-wide fascial system is 250 million. Compared with the estimated 200 million nerve endings in the skin, this suggests the human fascial network constitutes, in fact, our richest sensory organ.”  A recent systematic review of fascial tissue agrees and states, “fasciae may be considered our largest sensory organ given its complete surface area, as well as participating actively in proprioception and nociception” (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9143136/)

Really interestingly, for the information gathered by the fascial tissue to be of sufficient, excellent, and ACCURATE quality for us to have great feedback for things such as coordination and sensation of pain, then our fascia needs to be in excellent shape…literally!  If we zoom in with a fine microscope, we would see each row of collagen fibres making up the fascia in a beautiful zig-zag line, matching the same pattern alongside their fellow fibres. This lovely regular pattern of undulations is referred to as ‘crimp’, and occurs at the scale of microfibres  As we zoom out to see areas of healthy fascia, we can observe that fascial tissue is of regular patterns, like the diamonds of fishnet tights, all wrapped around muscles and organs in a very symmetrical (and useful) way – great for embracing and hammocking our different internal body parts, even as we move, lie, sit, or even do a handstand!

Conversely, when fascia is not used, then the collagen fibres in the fascia start to droop, become mishappen and entangled.  They start to look like a bowl of spaghetti. Now, can you imagine how you could possibly get accurate information coming into the brain from a messed up bunch of fascia fibres?  It would be pretty inaccurate; and it is no wonder that healthy fascia is associated with higher levels of coordination!

There are various things we can do, or have done to us, on a regular basis to improve the quality of our fascia. Movement certainly helps, but the type, quality and even speed of that movement will all make a difference.

If you are looking to improve proprioception and/or become more coordinated yourself or for your loved one or patients, then exploring the world of fascia is an important key for this. In 2025, Neuro Frontiers will be running several classes on fascia and techniques to help you to learn more about improving the fascial sensory system for enhancing brain function and performance. You can find more information here:

Tell me more about fascia and proprioception!