We’ve been doing a YIN class this week. Lovely slow, long-held poses, great for joints, fascia and connective tissue. And a YIN class is a good excuse to add something juicy to yoga. I added a bit of sound healing this week. Now the most exciting aspect of a YIN class for me (and it’s taken a while, I’m a Pitta (fire) dosha body type, and the slow nature of the YIN class can be challenging for the fire body types) is what it does for the fascia and connective tissue in the body. A good YIN class is a marinade of stillness, and inward focus and is wonderfully nourishing for the ground substance in your body, the connective tissue.

So, what is connective tissue? Our body can be described as a collection of specialised cells with different tasks. For the cells to be able to do their job, substances have to be able to move in and out of the cells in a liquid medium. The cells also need to communicate with each other so that one cell knows what the others are doing. They communicate via chemical signals like hormones and mechanically through mechanotransduction (how physical force in the body is converted to biochemical and electrical signals that are recognised by your cells). What’s interesting for us is that the communication takes place in the space between the cells, our connective tissue.

Connective tissue consists of a solid, fibrous part (collagen and elastin fibres) and a liquid part, the interstitial fluid or ground substance. And this is where stretching in a yoga class starts to come into its own, particularly long-held stretches. A long, slow stretch encourages the body to flow and starts to shift the liquid in your ground substance, helping it move between the collagen fibres and cells. This is a flow that lacks its own pump and is completely dependent on motion in the body. 

A sedentary lifestyle, an injury or an illness preventing movement in the body will impede this flow. And when the flow in the fascia and connective tissue stops, a higher pressure builds up, which impairs cell communication and transport, blood circulation, nerve signals and lymph transport in that area. As the flow of the body decreases, the friction between the fascia sheets increases and entire chains of motion is affected. As the flow and the slide and glide of the fascia decreases, muscles have to work harder, and we begin to perform compensatory movement patterns, asymmetric loads which overload some body parts and joints.

Life is flow. Yoga is flow. As long as we live, we have to have flow in the body. Yoga is a wonderful, whole-body movement modality enhancing fascia and connective tissue flow, enabling us to move through life with ease.  

Margot Wagner
 Yoga Under the Bodhi Tree

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