“For many people, fitness is still all about lifting weights to build bulk,” Myers says. “But what does that make you fit for? I’d argue that this”—he taps a key on his laptop and brings up a slide—“is a much more physically fit human than a bodybuilder.” On the screen is a photo of a baby rolling on its back, drinking from a bottle held between its hands and feet. Like Bruce Lee, the infant used fascia to solve a problem its muscle couldn’t. “You are fit if you can adapt to the demands of your environment with ease and imagination,” Myers says.
Your mind rebels against the image—a baby more fit than a bodybuilder—but by 2007 it wasn’t even the most jarring statement about fascia. Imaging technology had caught up with Myers’s scalpel, and Dr. Robert Schleip, head of the Fascia Research Project at Germany’s Ulm University, had discovered something remarkable: your fascia isn’t just taking orders—it’s giving them.
. . .
Dr. Schleip is a ponytailed, hipsterish professor and about as different from Steve Maxwell as possible, except for one thing: he also keeps his best tricks in his pocket. When I meet him in the training room at a London medical clinic where he’s come to present fresh fascia research, he goes into one side of his jacket for a fat bunch of keys and the other for a spring. He hooks the keyring to the end of the spring and sets it bouncing. Up and down, effortlessly and endlessly—until Schleip shifts his hand a fraction and the keyring goes wild, flying in all directions till it slows to a stop.
“Posture and rhythm,” Schleip explains. “Your body operates the same way. When you’re in alignment, your elastic tissue stores that energy and returns it. But when you’re off-balance, it comes to a halt. For health, for strength, this has serious consequences.”
Schleip is the one who first figured out how to thread ultrasound sensors into living fascia, and there he found something amazing: nerve endings. Your fascia is more than a bunch of wobbly rubber bands, he realized; it’s actually an intricate network of observe-and-report outposts, all of them gathering input from across your body and relaying it back to your brain. Fascia is as rich in sensory input as your tongue and eyes—even richer, possibly, since it’s getting info from everywhere.
“Fascia reacts and remembers,” Schleip says. Every move you make is a physical experiment; if the experiment works—if, say, you swish a jump shot while sticking out your tongue—that experiment becomes a habit. All those habits get locked in as posture. Over time, posture becomes structure. “Connective tissue is the Saint Bernard dog of the body—it’s slow and loyal,” Schleip explains. “Once it’s formed into position, it’ll stick there.”
That’s why you can recognize a friend from a distance before seeing her face. Harvard biologist Francisco Varela liked to call fascia the “organ of form,” because it creates your postural fingerprint; try to straighten your shoulders or change the way you walk and you’ll soon feel not only physically off-balance but emotionally uncertain. Fascia knows where you are in the world; it’s loaded with position sensors that contribute to your sense of balance and feeds those bearings directly to that fear-conditioning corner of your brain, the amygdala. Any movement grooved into the fascia feels soothing, gratifying, efficient; try to unlearn it, as any batting coach or ballet teacher will tell you, and you’re in for a struggle. New movements, no matter how necessary or logical, just feel wrong.
“Isn’t that a terrible evolutionary flaw?” I ask. Humans are extremely adaptable, so why isn’t our fascia?
Because it would have killed us, Schleip explains. For most of human existence, consistency is what kept us alive. Before we had bows or spears, we depended on all that springy elastic tissue in our legs, plus the superior cooling of our sweat glands and furless bodies, to run other animals to death. We were able to chase antelope across the African savanna for hours at a time until they overheated and collapsed. In that kind of race for survival, there’s no room for tinkering; you either hit your efficient stride and stuck with it or you died.
Until, of course, we turned our wobble power into an even deadlier weapon.
“Close your eyes,” Joe Darrah says as he slaps a tomahawk into my hand. “Keep them shut. Don’t think. Just throw.”
Joe is a former circus performer and master knifesmith. In the basement of his home in suburban Philadelphia, he’s got old sawmill blades he’s shaping into competition throwing knives. On his front lawn he’s got a half-dozen tree-stump slices bolted to an old table he’s placed uncomfortably close to his neighbor’s swing set. Joe got his start in the flinging arts in kindergarten, when his father, a U.S. Army Airborne Ranger, put a commando knife in his hand and taught him the rules of chicken. By the time Joe was a teenager he was good enough to go pro, and he got hired by a traveling circus to fling knives around showgirls. Now, at age fifty, he’s a seven-time world champion with both knives and tomahawks, and he’s also deadly accurate with the blowgun, bullwhip, and atlatl, an ancient spear-throwing weapon.
Luckily, Joe lives in the outskirts of Philadelphia in America’s coolest suburb, judging by the fact that none of his Berwyn, Pennsylvania, neighbors seem to care that Joe likes to practice on his front lawn and often spends his afternoons hurling highly tempered pointy things past their cars. They’re not even freaked when he hones his skills on human targets: next to the old door with the bolted-on log slices is a homemade body shield that Joe built by sawing a hole out of another old door and covering it with bulletproof glass. Joe gets friends to step behind the door and press their faces against the glass; it’s a whole different level of nerve control when the target you’re eyeing is eyeing you right back.
Joe hands me a ’hawk and then stands back and watches. I take my time and run through his pointers. Left foot forward; wide stance; easy overhand motion; tap the car keys in my right pocket on the follow-through to make sure I’m staying straight; and …
Clank!
The tomahawk shanks off the edge of the target, dropping into the dirt. Joe hands me another. Left foot forward …
Clank!
“What am I doing wrong?” I ask.
“Here comes the Zen stuff,” Joe says. “You’re trying to control your throw, and you can’t.” That’s when he tells me to try throwing with my eyes closed.
All righty. I squeeze my eyes, wind up, and let fly.
Thwock!
My tomahawk is buried in the log a few inches from the playing card.
“Wow, that’s—”
Before I can finish, Joe pivots. He windmills his arm and—thwock! thwock! thwock!—buries three ’hawks in three different targets. One splits the playing card right down the middle.
Joe grins. “You have to enter yourself and let the rhythm come. Once you do that, you can do all kinds of crazy things.”
“Humans are amazing throwers. We are unique among all animals in our ability to throw projectiles at high speeds and with incredible accuracy.” So says Dr. Neil Roach, of George Washington University, lead author of a 2013 study that tackles the mystery of why, out of all other primates on the planet, we’re the only ones who can kill prey with a lethal throw.
It’s not our muscles. Chimpanzees are extraordinary athletes and proportionately much stronger, but even though they’re our closest genetic cousins, they’re rotten pitchers. You can train a chimp to throw, but the most heat he’ll ever muster is about twenty miles per hour. For a Little Leaguer, that’s a joke; twelve-year-old boys can throw three times as fast, with much sharper precision. Softball star Jennie Finch routinely tops seventy miles per hour, and that’s underhand.
So what do we have that chimps don’t? A shoulder full of “rubbery gunk”—fascia and ligaments and stretchy tendons. Cocking your arm, Roach explains, is like pulling back a slingshot. “When this energy is then released, it powers the very rapid rotation of the upper arm, which is the fastest motion the human body produces—up to nine thousand degrees [of rotation] per second in professional pitchers!” A fast throw isn’t just muscular effort, but a three-stage uncoiling of elastic force: