03/12/2025
Fascia, fabric and the ‘secret tissue’ story
The recent Guardian article on fascia and foam rolling has been doing the rounds. On the surface it looks balanced, and in places it is. But woven through it are some very old fascia myths dressed in new language.
👉A simple way to see the problem is this:
We talk as if tissue is fabric, and the therapist is the tailor. If fascia is fabric, we can smooth it, lengthen it, retune it and fix people by adjusting the weave. It sounds neat. It does not match what we know about fascia, or about pain.
What the Guardian piece gets right✅
👉Fascia is presented as connective tissue that runs through and around muscles, nerves, vessels and organs.
👉It is described as having a rich nerve supply, contributing to body awareness.
👉The article clearly says you cannot break up fascia with a foam roller in the way many people believe. That is progress.
So yes, fascia is real, innervated connective tissue, and no, we are not smashing it to pieces with a roller. All good.
Then the fascia folklore creeps in.☹️
💧The 70% water claim, in perspective.
The Guardian repeats a familiar line that fascia is about 70% water. That sounds dramatic, but it needs context and, another number. Robert Schleip and colleagues have estimated that all fascial tissues together make up only about 17% of total body weight. Most adults are already around 50–60% water overall. Many lean tissues, including muscle, brain, heart and fascia, sit in the 70–80% water range. So yes, fascia is watery, but it is not uniquely wet and it is only a small percentage of the whole. The message cannot honestly be ‘keep your fascia hydrated’. What we are really talking about is keeping the whole person hydrated and healthy. Keeping it in perspective stops the hydration story turning into yet another fascia fairy tale.
🍊Tangerine pith and the internal wetsuit.
‘The easiest way to describe fascia is to think about the white pith of a tangerine… essentially the body’s internal wetsuit.’
Nice picture. Completely misleading 🤨 This idea harps back to the old-fashioned story of the fascial structures being dissected away from the rest of the body and binned.
Fascia is not a separate suit wrapped around internal structures. It is a continuous three-dimensional matrix that blends into muscle, tendon, ligament, capsule, periosteum and organ coverings; it communicates with every other part of the body. Turning it into a wetsuit suggests a distinct layer that can be tightened, lengthened or adjusted, as if tissue is fabric and the therapist is the tailor.
‘Constantly talking to the brain’ and ‘locking us into movements’👀 The article claims fascia is constantly talking to the brain about what the body feels, and that it can lock us into certain movement patterns. Fascia does send information to the nervous system. So do skin, muscle, joints, viscera and blood vessels. There is nothing uniquely chatty about fascia 😜
Adaptation to repeated postures and loads is a whole system process. Motor control, expectations, confidence, joint range, muscle tone and multiple tissues all contribute. Saying fascia is ‘locking us in’ feeds the idea that if we can just free that fabric, movement will normalise. It keeps everything firmly tissue centred when the real organiser is the nervous system.
The invisible-on-scans, deep structural problem narrative
🧐This is the most worrying part. It claims, ‘Many issues that can arise with fascia will not be clear on MRI, which is one reason deep seated structural problems are hard to diagnose.’
The story hinted at in the article is the idea that fascial problems are invisible on scans and therefore explain persistent, deep seated pain that no one else can find. This has all the ingredients of a perfect ‘secret tissue’ story to be blamed for long standing pain and positioned as something only specialist therapists can assess and treat.
To claim that a hidden fascial layer is the cause of pain ignores everything we have learned in the last few decades about pain itself.
Pain has never mapped neatly onto any single tissue, visible or invisible. People can have a lot of pain with minor structural change, and very little pain with quite dramatic findings. That mismatch is not a fascia problem. It is how pain works.
On top of that, fascia is not (yet) defined as a new organ in any serious anatomical classification. Calling it a ‘sensory organ’ may be useful metaphorically, but it is not a licence to present it as a newly discovered system that explains every stubborn symptom.
👉Victim, perpetrator and the pathoanatomical trap
The article at least admits you cannot break up fascia. Then it says, ‘It is the way muscles and fascial lines interact, or fail to, that leads to discomfort. Do not mistake the victim for the perpetrator.’
This sounds clever, but it still treats tissue as perpetrator.
Pain does not live in tissue. Pain is a perception, a protective output of the brain. Local load and tissue state are just one part of a much larger picture that includes past experience, beliefs, attention, stress, sleep and social context.
Calling the problem a ‘dysfunctional fascial line’ instead of a ‘tight muscle’ does not fix the basic mistake, it is still the same tissue based blame story. ⛔️
👉Keyboard pain, hypervigilance and hypersensitivity
The Guardian example of fascia tightening you into a keyboard posture and making other movements trickier is another rebrand of old thinking.
Two people can sit at a keyboard for the same length of time. One develops pain, the other does not. The difference is not that one person’s fascia has secretly stiffened and the other’s has stayed supple.
Hypervigilance, hypersensitivity, previous pain experiences, stress, sleep, workload and beliefs all influence whether the nervous system outputs pain in that context. Fascia may be one of many tissues providing input, but it is not the decision maker.
When we tell this story as a fascia problem, we strip out the nervous system and the person’s life and blame the fabric.
👉Pandiculation and the stretch–yawn response
The article edges towards the idea that the body instinctively knows how to move to free restricted fascia, for example when people fidget and stretch after being still.
What is being described is pandiculation, the stereotyped stretch–yawn behaviour seen across many animals. It is a centrally driven neuromuscular pattern. It involves muscle, joints, skin, fascia, breathing and shifts in arousal.
Some authors have speculated that it helps maintain myofascial integrity. There is no good evidence that this response is primarily about fascia, or that its effects can be isolated to fascial tissue.
It makes more sense to see it as the nervous system using movement to regulate comfort and state. Again, fascia is part of the picture, not the star of the show. ⛔️
The ‘secret fascia’ story and why it is harmful 👈
The secret fascia story treats fascia as if it is uniquely special, more important than other tissues because it is watery, innervated and supposedly hidden on scans. From there it is easy to blame fascia for every stubborn problem and to suggest that only particular techniques or practitioners can fix it. That way of thinking isolates fascia from the rest of the body and from the person living in that body. It turns tissue into fabric and the therapist into a tailor, instead of seeing fascia as one strand in a much bigger weave.
We cannot single fascia out as the place where pain lives. Pain is not stored in any tissue. It is a perception, constructed by the brain as a protective response, using information from across the whole system, including but not limited to fascial input. If we make fascia the villain or the saviour, we have missed what modern pain science is trying to show us.
Fascia still matters. It is a rich, interesting connective tissue network with complex mechanics and sensory roles, and it is worth studying. The point is not to make fascia special, it is to place it in context.
When therapists understand fascia as part of an integrated system, and understand pain as a perception rather than a property of tissue, our touch, our explanations and our treatment plans become more honest, more flexible and more effective.
That is the real value in keeping up with fascia research, not to sell a new magic layer, but to deepen how we think about the people under our hands.
Train with In-Touch Education.
Read the Guardian article here. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/nov/24/secrets-of-the-body-what-is-fascia-health-foam-roller
