Andria juts her neck like a tortoise, and then lifts her chin.
“Shoulder girdle: anterior tilt,” adds James Ready, the Diamond-backs’ trainer.
Andria hunches her back as if she’s been punched in the gut.
The group continues feeding instructions until someone yells, “Freeze!”
“Perfect!” one of Myers’s students says. She turns to me. “That’s you.”
I look at Andria. “That’s me?”
“You to a T,” Ready agrees.
Yikes. One of Andria’s shoulders is caved, her hips are off-kilter, and her head is jutting like a silverback gorilla’s. That’s me? I was ordering my body to stand Marine Corps straight, but as I look at my reflection in Andria’s body and wince, one thing is obvious: something more powerful than mind and muscle is telling my body what to do. That mystery force, Tom Myers explains, is the unstoppable pull of elastic tissue.
When it comes to raw strength, muscle is only a minority partner. The real powerhouse is our fascia profunda, the stretchy tissue that encases our organs and muscle. Until recently, fascia was considered no more important than the gooey film around a chicken breast. But in 1999, Myers was assisting in a cadaver dissection when he became intrigued by the “rubbery gunk beneath the skin,” as he describes it. The anatomists he was working with were slicing right through it because they wanted a good, unobstructed view of the muscle underneath. But fascia was everywhere, and getting through it wasn’t always easy. In some spots, it was as tough as a car tire.
Maybe this is more than just sausage casing, Myers thought. There was one way to find out. “All I had to do was turn my scalpel sideways,” Myers recalls. Instead of slicing through the gunk, he sliced along it, gently freeing it from skin and bone. By the time he’d finished, he was looking at a full-length body sleeve that resembled a lumpy wetsuit. Myers was intrigued to see that the flesh suit wasn’t simply a slick sheet of tissue; it was more like a crisscross of fibers and cables, an endless circulatory system of strength. Under magnification, the fascia was so latticed, it seemed to have the tensile strength of storm netting.
Myers’s twist-of-the-wrist technique revealed another surprise: internally, your body is shaped like your DNA. Fascia connects muscle to muscle, forming two continuous spirals from your feet to your forehead, which twirl around each other like the strands of a double helix. Meaning? Your body is rigged like a compound archery bow. Superstretchy tissue links your left foot to the right hip, the right hip to the left shoulder, and it’s much tougher than any muscle.
“Think of a ladder twisted on itself,” Myers explains. The spiral line of fascia crisscross your abdomen, drop over your hips and down your shins to your foot, where it loops under the arch like a stirrup. So next time you watch LeBron James blast off the paint for a dunk, observe him with Tom Myers’s eyes. While everyone else is focused on the ball in LeBron’s outstretched hand, Myers is zeroing in on how LeBron’s trailing arm stretches wide behind his body; how the toes of his lead leg point upward; how the fingers of his idle hand splay wide. Individually, they’re details. Together, they’re fused elements in the same explosive act, all as crucially connected as match, fuse, and gunpowder.
Hold on. The part about the fingers. I get how they’d improve balance—maybe—but vertical leap?
Absolutely, says Steve Maxwell. And with the little device in his pocket, he can prove it. Steve is a former world champion Brazilian jiu-jitsu fighter and now a strength-and-conditioning coach who specializes in recovering lost innovations. “The old-timers knew what was up with fascia long before we even had a word for it,” he explains. “You’ll always be safe if you go back to the mighty men of old, the guys before the 1950s. Look at the old gyms, with their Indian clubs and medicine balls. What’s that all about if not balance, range of motion, being fluid, using elastic recoil?”
Steve could have stepped out of a vintage fight poster himself. He’s over fifty but still has the build of a bare-knuckle boxer, all menace in motion with no meat to spare. If an eccentric billionaire were hunting humans for sport on a desert island, you’d put money on Steve to get away. Every morning, even in subfreezing winters, he begins the day with the ancient Hindu wrestlers’ tradition of stepping outside in the nude and dumping a five-gallon jerrycan of cold water over his head. Back when he was a star wrestler at West Chester University, Steve had such reverence for the sport’s ancestry that he once staged a throwback Olympic Games, complete with naked events. He managed to graduate anyway and went on to found Maxercise, a Philadelphia gym that became one of the country’s most respected conditioning centers for mixed martial arts fighters. Even the Gracie clan, the Brazilian dynasty that rules Ultimate Fighting, sent up-and-comers to Maxercise to be burned into shape.
One thing Steve is always searching for is elastic-recoil energy, because fighters have no margin for error. You can be the strongest He-Man ever to enter the ring, but if you run out of gas before your opponent, you’re cooked. That’s why even human mountains like heavyweight boxing legend Sonny Liston spent as much time skipping rope as they did hitting the heavy bag. “Jumping, bouncing, skipping—it’s all free energy that comes from fascia, not muscle,” Steve explains. Get that bounce right and you can pogo-stick around while barely using any muscular force. Liston weighed 220 pounds and was powerful enough to win three out of every four professional bouts by knockout, but he learned to move his feet as rhythmically as a schoolgirl, usually to James Brown’s “Night Train.”
“Strength is a skill,” Steve says. “In the old days, every Celtic village used to have its ‘manhood stone.’ You didn’t pass into adulthood until you could move that stone. But it wasn’t about brute force; strength was knowing how to use all the tools inside your body. Here, this will blow your mind….”
Steve roots around in his pocket and comes out with a rubber band. “Put this around the fingers of one hand, right up there near the fingernails. Now spread your fingers as wide as you can. Really fight it. Good. Close them and open again.” It’s so easy I’m getting a little embarrassed for Steve, and that’s when he pulls his big reveal.
“It would be stupid to throw an arrow, right?” he says. “Better to use your muscles to pull back the string and let the string do the work.” He tells me to strip off the rubber band, drop to the floor, and get ready for push-ups. But instead of lowering my chest to the floor and straining my way back up, I’m to reverse it: I’m supposed to spread my fingers as wide as they were with the rubber band, mash my palms hard into the floor, and pull myself down. When I do, I surprise even myself when my elbows straighten with barely any effort.
“See?” Steve says. “You tightened the spring on the way down, then it popped you right up.” I try it again, and it feels like I’m being sprung from a toaster. I’m not sure how it’s working—I’m not even sure if Steve knows—but those were the easiest twenty push-ups of my life.
“What if everything we thought we knew about muscles was wrong?” Tom Myers concludes. “Are there really six hundred muscles, or only one?” Bruce Lee always said his best punch came from his big toe, and now it seemed he wasn’t kidding. Lee could position his fist a finger length away from a 250-pound man and with the tiniest flick, he’d send the guy flying. Left toe triggers right hip; right hip pulls back left shoulder; left shoulder catapults right fist, all that power building like a tiny ripple at sea until—wham!—it crashes down far from where it started. Martial artists call Lee’s punch “long-distance ging”—strength from afar.