The Importance of Living a Balanced Lifestyle – Myofascial Activated Posture

What is Fascia and how does it affect my body?

How often does your body feel stiff, do you get headaches, have lower back pain, or just do not feel like exercising? Our body is a whole system and if one part suffers the whole body suffers. An injured hip can cause back pain, a stiff neck or even a headache. Everything in our body is connected by fascia – this is the connective tissue that glues our whole body together.

Fascia glues your skin to your muscles. Each muscle strand is glued together into a bundle with fascia, and each bundle is glued to the bone by fascia. Fascia is a thin casing of connective tissue that holds and surrounds every organ, blood vessel, bone and nerve fibre. It keeps every muscle in place. Fascia consists primarily of collagen. Collagen is instrumental in supporting tissue repair, including the gut and skin, and assists in preventing premature ageing.

We all know that the importance of living a balanced lifestyle is crucial for our wellbeing. It starts with a balanced diet which includes all the various food groups ingested adequately.

A balanced diet is never in excess as is so often the case. Nor is it about starving yourself to achieve a body that you were not designed to have. Drinking enough fresh, clean water and getting enough exercise will ensure that your body functions optimally.

What can I do to improve how I feel?

Myofascial Activated Posture (MAP) is movement therapy; this means that you introduce movement into your fascial suit yourself. This can be either by moving actively into the tightness or with the use of equipment such as a foam roller. This is different from manual therapy. With manual therapy a therapist, such as a physiotherapist or a chiropractor, creates movement within your body with their hands. The importance of moving into the space of tightness and hydrating your facial suit is crucial to living a pain-free life. Our fascial suits dehydrate due to an extreme lifestyle of sitting and a general lack of movement into all the different spaces. This results in a feeling of tightness, a loss of the ability to move into certain positions, an imbalance in posture and movement in general.

MAP movement aims to bring back our mobility and decrease our pain – once we have created the space, we strengthen into it. Therefore, a typical MAP movement class is a combination of creating space and then strengthening into that space. Strengthening muscles once enough space has been created results in a much more effective strengthening as the muscle can fully extend through its entire range.

Conclusion

At Thrivosity we do not believe that pharmaceutical products solve all our problems. The products aid in the recovery and the support of certain systems and organs, but there is always more to it than just taking a product. Drinking sufficient clean, fresh water, exercising, and eating healthy nutrient-dense food support a healthy lifestyle.

The Thrivosity product range supports and aids your overall wellbeing:

• PROliv Plus is a combination of nine probiotic bacteria aiding liver health.
• Natural Salt Mixture (NSM), aids in the reduction of pathogenic bacteria, specifically in the small intestine.
• Chitosan helps improve immune robustness.

Take a look at how our products can help you with the importance of living a balanced lifestyle.

One of our Thrivosity associates, Martina Johannes offers in studio and online MAP Movement classes. To find out more on MAP Movement and how classes work, feel free to contact Martina on 065 389 4835 or email martinajoh.physio@gmail.com.  Instagram: move_with_martina |  www.mapmovement.co.za