In order to better understand just how yoga works, we need to examine the specific physiological Principles and Laws that apply directly to yoga. But first, we need to take a closer look at blood, muscle, tendon, ligament and the all important fascia; collectively known as soft tissue.1
Blood
Blood is the main transportation system of the body by supplying oxygen and nutrients. Blood gives the body its energy and promotes healing. Blood also transports the effluents of metabolism away from the body.
Ligament
Ligament is a dense, fibrous material that connects bone-to-bone. It needs to be very strong and in order to maintain stability, it needs to resist stretching. As compared to tendon and muscle, ligament is the least pliable and has the least apparent vascularisation.2 As such, sudden over stretching and tearing of ligaments usually causes significant and debilitating injury.3
Look at the knee detail in Bachin's Skeletal System (click on Bachin to see the entire skeletal system; then left-click and select "BACK" to return to this page) It shows that ligament, unlike muscle tissue, is completely white indicating limited blood infusion. Accordingly, a severe ligament injury has little ability to heal itself and repair usually requires surgical intervention.
You obviously would not wish to intentionally irritate or tear a ligament. Yet when trying to do yoga, it is easy to stretch deeply into and around joints irritating both tendons and ligaments. Both ExTension and Recovery Yoga clearly and definitely avoid deep joint and ligament stretching.
Tendon
Tendon is also a strong and dense fibrous material, but less so than ligament. Muscles do not directly attach to bones, but instead, merge into tendons and it is the tendon that attaches to bone. Although tendon is more vascularized than ligament, it is far less vascularized than muscle. Even though tendon is more elastic and vascularized than ligament, sudden or prolonged tendon stretching can create a chronic and debilitating inflammation of tendon, known as tendinitis.4
 These two pictures illustrate the difference between muscle and tendon. Look at the picture on the left. Bend your arm, take your fingers and pluck that bony like structure that's close to your elbow joint. That's not actually bone; its tendon.
 Now look at the photo on the right. Take your fingers and squeeze all around the thicker tissue which is the belly of your biceps muscle. Again, the differences in these tissues are profound. Muscle is fully vascularized, elastic and is designed to lengthen and contract.
Whenever you over exercise and experience that familiar muscle soreness, you have actually created micro-muscle tearing. But due to muscles' abundant blood supply, you heal quickly and your soreness rapidly dissipates.
On the other hand, because tendon is less vascularized; aggressive, excessive, or otherwise inappropriate stretching in and around joints can result in chronic tendinitis. One last thing here; as we continue to age, ligament and tendon become naturally less vascularized thereby increasing the risk of soft tissue injury. ("Ages and stages" will be discussed more in depth later on). Muscle is a fully vascularized, blood-infused tissue. When you look at Bachin's Muscular System, you see that muscles are darker (more red) than tendons and ligaments.
Because muscle merges into tendon and tendon attaches onto bone, contraction of muscle creates skeletal body movement. The very nature of muscle movement always creates some micro tearing of muscle fiber (as well as accumulation of metabolic waste products). The extent of irritation is proportional to the intensity of muscle movement (resistance) as well as how “out of shape” the muscle tissue is.
Given their richly blood infused nature, minor muscle irritations usually heal quickly. More severe muscle injuries usually heal proportionally to the extent of the irritation as well as its location; specifically, the closer an irritation is to tendon, the longer it takes to heal. In any event, muscle injuries heal quicker than tendon injuries and tendon injuries heal quicker than ligament injuries.
Muscle
Muscle only contracts when stimulated.5 Under normal conditions, the brain sends a message to a muscle stimulating it to contract. Normally, after contraction, the muscle relaxes. Thus, during normal movement, including exercise, muscle tissue alternately contracts and releases and skeletal-muscular movement is created.
Muscle also contracts when it has been traumatized, but when traumatized, muscle does not readily return to its relaxed state. As muscle stays in a state of chronic tension, your body's energy and normal functioning is reduced. In addition, chronically contracted muscles pull on their attachments, causing the body to be pulled further off the plumb thus causing further soft tissue stress which in turn, causes further stress upon the "plumb line" which will be discussed later.
Fascia
It has been said that fascia is "the bag that holds the body together." Fascia, depending upon its location can be thick or thin. It is a whitish, sometimes transparent and prolific matrix of collagen fibers and fat cells that overlays your entire body, directly under your skin, from the top of your head to the tip of your toes.
Fascia also encapsulates virtually every structure within your entire body, including each muscle group, the individual components of each muscle, all your organs, glands, nerves and blood vessels.
All fascia throughout your entire body is interrelated. Although it connects everything, fascia has no specific, identifiable origin or insertion as muscles have.
Understanding the characteristics of fascia helps
you
to understand how yoga affects the body;
and ultimately, the mind and spirit.
When fascia is over stimulated from any sort of traumatic incident, be in physical or sometimes, even emotional, its matrix twists, shortens and contracts; and in so doing, inhibits all circulatory and nerve processes that transverse through it. Think of your body being encapsulated in shrink-wrap that contracts and inhibits circulation of all underlying soft-tissue structures.
Thus fascia and its resultant contraction is a direct contributor to the stiffness and pain we experience following injury and illness; all of which exacerbates as we grow older.
Understanding the characteristics of fascia is the key to understanding how to create an appropriate yoga practice that maximizes yoga's benefits and minimizes its liability.
Through the years, physical and emotional injuries, micro-tears, simple pulls, little tweaks, and the wear and tear of daily life — all these everyday occurrences affect all of your soft tissue; and this is especially true for your fascia.
When injured or traumatized, soft tissue contracts. It has to. It's a way of making you slow down and allows an injury to heal while you continue to live your life. Contraction of fascia and muscle protects you from exacerbating your injuries. Unfortunately, as an injury “heals” (if in fact it ever really does), contracted fascia seldom releases back to its pre-injured state. You heal, but your body "remembers."
As we age, the fascia in and around areas of a pre-existing injury usually contracts further. It appears that, about every ten years beginning from about the ages of approximately 28 to 32, fascia without intervention becomes less resilient and causes the muscles surrounded by it to become tighter and tighter.
Indirectly, this fascia tightening exacerbates preexisting injuries and pain (which is explained by Hilton's Law below). Have you noticed these ten-year thresholds as you've aged (28 to 32, 38 to 42, 48 to 52, etcetera)? Have you again begun to feel those long ago injuries that you thought were fully healed? Or perhaps at best, are you starting to feel sluggish and tighter? Why does this happen? Hilton's Law helps provide us with an explanation.
Hilton's Law as Applied to Fascia
 When we visualize the muscles of the human body, we often think of the structures as individual muscles, as shown on the picture on the left. However, fascia is a broad diffuse matrix that encapsulates each individual muscle as well as overlaying all the individual muscle structures of your body, as shown on the picture on the right.
Hilton's Law says that the nerve root that supplies a joint, supplies all the muscles that attach to that joint, and the overlying skin. Hilton further states that "every fascia of the body has a muscle attached to it, and that every fascia throughout the body must be considered as a muscle."
Thus, when you have been chronically ill or injured, the muscles of your body often behave in two seemingly contradictory ways. Your muscles become soft and flaccid. They lose tone and mass. Yet at the same time, you feel as if almost every muscle in your body has contracted and tightened up making you stiff and sore. Why does this happen?
Keep in mind that fascia encapsulates each individual muscle, each muscle group, as well as the entire body. Fascia is usually a slippery substance, which allows your muscles to easily slide through and over each other, and allows muscles to lengthen and shorten within their "fascia casings."
Fascia allows individual muscles to move freely without binding. That is; unless you have been chronically ill or injured. Fascia then becomes less resilient and slippery. And notwithstanding aging alone, illness or injury only accelerates that contraction.
Conclusion:
Nature created quite an amazing mechanism for protecting its creatures when they have become injured or ill. When injured or ill, what does an animal in nature do? Where does it go? Does it go about its daily activities such as foraging for food or communing with others? Does it take its young to soccer practice; or have friends over for dinner?
Well of course not! What an animal in nature does is to find a dark, safe, quiet little place in which to lie down until it recovers or dies. It does this because nature knows that to prevent further and perhaps irreparable damage, the animal needs time to heal; to immobilize itself for a time before it resumes its normal activities.
And herein lies the beauty of yoga. By understanding the nature of fascia and by adhering to the Seven Principles of a Highly Effective Yoga Practice (see next page), we don't necessarily have to succumb to fascia contraction as we age or when injured or ill.
The Bachin Charts are used by permission of the Anatomical Chart Company, Skokie, IL.
Fascia and Muscle illustrations from C.D. Clemente: Anatomy. A Regional Atlas of the Human Body, 3rd Ed. Philadelphia. Used with permission.
1 A "tissue" is a group of similar cells united to perform a specific function.
2 vascularization is growth of blood vessels into a tissue with the result that the oxygen and nutrient supply is improved.
3 For an in depth study of ligament vascularization, see:
4 Personal correspondence with Mathew J. Taylor, MPT, RYT, April, 2001, used with permission:
Taylor: Equally and in the case of ACLs for sure is the nerurofeedback mechanism of the ligament conveying proprioceptive input to both the PNS and CNS via type III mechanoreceptors&this feed back loop is altered and modified with inappropriate stretching thus not only is the static integrity of the ligament and corresponding joint compromised, but the reflex loop for control is damaged. Takes the info beyond the massage level of physiology to high end exercise phys. On the other hand, because tendon is less vascularised, aggressive or consistent stretching in and around a joint often results in chronic tendinitis. I'm not sure this statement can be substantiated, particularly consistent &inappropriate or excessive yes, consistent with good technique should be fine as the dynamic muscular component will absorb the energetic load and dissipate the forces.
Dworkis: You are correct, but how may people understand and/or can employ "good technique." In any event, my statement needs clarification. I've changed that paragraph as follows: "On the other hand, because tendon is less vascularised; aggressive, excessive, or otherwise inappropriate stretching in and around a joint can result in chronic tendinitis."
Taylor: Bingo5 ibid
Taylor: There is actually a good deal of cortex override that suppresses primitive brain tone and reflexes( the spastic stroke ) thereby inhibiting contractions vs causing them. This is critical when we try to link the mind or frontal cortex functioning to motor or exercise performance. How germane to this audience I'm not sure, but if you want the docs and rehab people to climb on board, might need to acknowledge complexity similar to how you did with simplification of yoga.
Dworkis: I agree. Changes have been made and are now reflected above.
6 Hilton's Law: From Principles of Osteopathy, 4th Edition, Dain L. Tasker, D. O. 1916.
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