Comment by _ywdj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _ywdj | Hacker News Reader

Over the years I've written here several times about my efforts to explain and overcome mysterious chronic health impairments including fatigue/lethargy and tension/pain.

In recent times, my research and experimentation has led me to explanations and treatments that focus on the fascia, and whilst I've not yet achieved full recovery (a recovery time of several years is par for the course with these kinds of issues), this approach does seem to be helping to improve my conditions.

The approaches I've been undertaking include yoga/pilates-type stretching exercises and specific types of massage that seek to break up fascia "adhesions" [1].

I'm being careful not to make any specific claims of diagnoses or remedies, as I'm fully aware from my own experience (and background as a scientifically-minded person) that this this whole topic is nascent in terms of solid scientific evidence, and rife with pseudoscience.

But it does seem clear to me that there is "something there", and that more research into this topic could likely lead to explanations and remedies for conditions like "chronic pain" and "chronic fatigue", which many people currently endure for years or for life without understanding or relief.

[1] It's not the only work I've been doing; as I've written about here before, diet, cardio exercise and emotional work have all been part of my regimen for some years, but since introducing the practices that focus on fascia, my condition has improved faster and in different ways.

Note: tight fascia with trigger points inside _cannot_ be released by stretching alone. Source: personal focus of finding why the hell my posture was crooked after falling off bike; after 3 years of weekly massages my therapist and me finally found a huge trigger point in a thigh. It took one-two weeks to release fully, and then my posture magically straightened.

People swear by trigger points , and as it is a relatively recent discovery, not every massage therapist knows about them.

Also make sure to get a good therapist. I had somebody do trigger point therapy with me for a few months and had zero improvements while the sessions were very painful every time.

I’m in the same boat as you. My PT has helped a lot. I discovered many of the treatments were in the book The Perrin Technique. The symptoms in the book described me exactly.

I gave her a copy to read and it has helped greatly. My PT told another one of her patients with similar symptoms who has gone from mostly bed/housebound to regular outings.

Even as much as a disalignment of a degree forward or backward rotation in the pelvis, caused by sitting for a long time and thereby shortening the back muscle, or hunching forward, can cause stress on other systems in the body.

Here is a little fun exercise to show the effect of fascia : bend over, straight legs and see how far your hands go, just measuring how close you get to your feet (they don’t have to touch, don’t push yourself, just see where you end up) Now take a tennisbal or small round object and stand or move with one foot on it for a while, and roll a bit especially on the arch of the foot, like a massage. Now do the exercise again, bending over with your hands towards your feet and see what happens.

For that experiment to be valid you'd probably want to do a control where you try the stretch, then wait doing nothing for the same amount of time that you would roll your feet and try again and another where you just rotate your ankle in the same way you would if you had a tennis ball under it. Taking your baseline reading one day and trying the tennis ball plus stretch the next day or week would be good too.

This wouldn't really convince me because I find any additional stretching helps with my reach and I'm more likely to chalk it up to a warm up effect or maybe some other effect on the the tendons or muscles. I don't see any particular reason to attribute it to fascia release.

But you haven't said anything here that discount that it could be, at least in part, due to fascia release.

In the end who cares ? The practice works so why should I wonder if it’s fascia or not?

Just don't try to touch your toes

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i69PC4PJdAQ

Tldw?

It is 4 and a half minutes of an incredibly ripped guy explaining that standing toe touches usually isn't stretching what you think it does and is often achieved by putting other body parts in positions that are not beneficial -- eg, rounding your back. Instead he gives a different exercise. Watch from about the 2:30 mark to see the recommended stretch.

This is how they sell those magnet bracelets that "align your chakras" or whatever. The reason you can reach farther the second time is that you stretched.

> Even as much as a disalignment of a degree forward or backward rotation in the pelvis, caused by sitting for a long time and thereby shortening the back muscle...

This doesn’t pass the sniff test. Your pelvis tilts by more than a degree just from slightly tightening your glutes.

Also, how does sitting shorten the back muscles? Sitting puts the back in a mild state of flexion.

Put another way, [citation needed]

The condition is called anterior or posterior pelvic tilt. However you are right that the back muscles are not the responsible muscles and it comes from somewhere else. Thing is while looking up the issue I see many different causes stated. So the cause might be different in different people.

1 degree doesn’t make for anterior or posterior pelvic tilt. Also a number of doctors who specialize in fitness (e.g. Austin Baraki) do not recognize this as a legitimate disordered condition anyway.

Check out “spark in the machine”

I notice how carefully you had to tread here to not actually talk about or discuss, brainstorm or theorize, what's going on - not sharing any specifics of your experience except that there is "something there."

And I understand why, it's because enough of a majority of people on HN aren't very open minded nor supportive of open discussing theory or anything unproven, so like where I briefly shared my thoughts here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21961032 - it quickly got -3 points, and deemed unacceptable for anyone else to chime in if they have similar thoughts or theories or experiences to share to add to a body of knowledge, even if mostly anecdotal.

Edit: Downvoted for sharing my observations of people's behaviour on HN? Brilliant.

I've been discussing these topics on HN for a long time. I've learned it's better to meet people where they're at than to demand people immediately leap to my place of understanding.

Interesting perspective that them simply reading something you wrote is demanding something of them - I suppose it could be taken that way if they take everything they read as wanting it to be their gospel. HN's downvote mechanism certainly reenforces you having to adjust vs. creating a better system for tolerance in discussion if you don't want your voice to be suppressed - which we all naturally do, perhaps unless we're depressed or don't believe our voice is worth being heard.

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