Fiber Optic Carbon Fibers
Fiber Optic Carbon Fibers
In this story, we learn how our bodies are constructed from the most high tech fabric in existence—fascia. It conducts light, heat, sound, force, and generates its own electricity. ⚡️
TLDR: I’ll summarize this story for you.
The outermost layer of the human “robot” is covered with a protective skin. Our skin cells, called Keratinocytes, protect our internal water from contamination. Remember, 60% of the body is water that has been purified so that our cells can perform chemical reactions and conduct electricity. So our skin cells have way more oils and fats, called Lipids, than any other cells in the body. Keratinocytes even pack lipids into the extracellular matrix between cells.
Our skin even has its own oil “sprinkler system” that constantly secretes fresh oils onto the surface of our bodies. The little sprinkler heads are known as Sebaceous Glands and the oil is known as Sebum. Sebum protects us from bacteria, viruses, and the sun with a mixture of lipids, wax esters, and squalene. Squalene is an antioxidant to protect us against harmful UV radiation, so your skin is secreting its own sunscreen on you right now. 😎
@biblenerds: Oils protect us from the entropy in the environment. It’s why oils are the main ingredient in lotions, lip balms, and shampoos. The Bible uses oil in anointing rituals for the same reason we use oil to fry up chicken in a pan—oil protects us from the fire. 🔥
Fascinating Fascia
Just below our skin is a fabric that wraps around our entire body called Fascia. Fascia is one of the most fascinating substances in the human body. Fascia and fascinating both come from the same Latin word that means “to bind”. To be fascinated literally means to be spellbound. To learn more about fascia, here are a few quotes from “Fascia 101” by Ashley Black.
The Four Types of Fascia
Superficial Fascia: Considered the deepest layer of skin, superficial fascia gives you your outward shape.
Deep Fascia: This layer of dense, fibrous connective tissue surrounds individual muscles and ligaments and groups them together for functional movement.
Visceral Fascia: Found within your abdomen, visceral fascia surrounds your internal organs and suspends them in place.
Fascial “Spinal Straw”: These three layers of fascia surround the spinal column and attach to all the other types of fascia to provide nourishment to the spinal discs of the spine. This type of fascia is also responsible for shortening the distance between vertebrae.
What Does Fascia Do?
Forms Connective Tissue: Like a rubber band wrapped around and within a set of straws, fascia holds your body parts in place and connects them. Fascia moves, relaxes, and stretches with the muscle fibers, and this sticky material also houses blood and nerves that link each part of your body together.
Reacts to Trauma: Fascia protects your systems from within by reacting and responding to trauma. For example, it's the material responsible for creating post-surgery scar tissue. Fascia also creates tightness in your joints when they are unstable or misaligned. While this tightness is a protective measure that prevents you from further injuring yourself, tight fascia tissue can cause problems and limit your range of motion.
Acts as a Communication System: As fascia is found within almost every region of the body, it provides the perfect framework for a functional communication system. Like a fiber optic cable, the fascia sends signals from one part of your body to the rest—all more quickly and efficiently than your nerve endings can.
Stores Fluid: Fascia is filled with fluid, which keeps it flexible. This fluid must flow continuously to maintain smooth functioning. If the fascia is low on fluid, it will fail to operate properly.
Efficient Delivery System: Fascia acts as the ultimate transportation system by delivering nutrients to cells and transporting waste and other unwanted compounds. It absorbs the nutrients from the capillaries and transports them throughout the body through blood.
Transfers Electrical Energy: Similar to acupuncture, fascia transfers energy and frequency vibrations from one part of your body to the rest. In fact, ancient healing arts like QiGong believe that fascia contains and transports Qi, the body's ultimate life force.
Long Term Storage System: While storage systems are beneficial for protecting your physical belongings, the fascia can hold on to more than you bargained for. This connective tissue holds onto toxins as well as emotions and trauma. Releasing these toxins from your fascia through massage therapy appointments with physical therapists can lead to significant improvements—emotionally, mentally, and physically.
What Does Unhealthy Fascia Do?
tightens the entire body and limits your range of motion
triggers myofascial pain syndrome (MPS)
disrupts communication signals and limits blood flow
traps toxins in the body
dries out and becomes brittle and thick
cannot take in nutrients, causing cells to die
blocks energy flow and cell voltage
limits muscle elasticity and triggers chronic pain
physically traps trauma in your body
may trigger tightening that leads to migraines
can tear, like a hernia or grade 1-2 muscle tear
can fold or bunch, causing adhesions
Fascia is a really big deal. Every muscle we have is doubled bagged in fascia. Every organ we have is double bagged in fascia. The shape of our fascia even defines the shape of our body…in every kind of way you can imagine. We basically live inside a “tailored wetsuit” made of fascia fabric.
The fabric of our wetsuit is so high tech, that it is practically magical. All of our nerve fibers are woven into this fabric, so it works like a flexible circuit board all throughout our bodies.
Fascia fibers also conduct heat, sound, and force. So our bodies communicate information through forces faster than it does through our nervous systems. This works just like a spider web—when a fly gets caught at the edge of a spider web, its struggle to escape can be felt across the entire web. Most amazingly, our fascia fibers conduct light, which means they are Fiber Optic. Here’s what they look like up close.
Fascia not only carries the wiring for our nervous systems, it is also Piezoelectric, which means it generates electricity when it’s compressed. When we walk, the ground force from each step actually sends a wave of electricity from our feet up through our entire body. We literally “plug into the ground” with every step we take, which is why NASA requires astronauts to run on a treadmills in space for two hours every day.
If they don’t power their muscles, they can’t even walk when they return to Earth.
The very individual way each foot strikes the ground changes how the piezoelectricity is distributed throughout our bodies. That’s why you might have seen a chart like this from Chinese medicine:
For some crazy reason, Western medicine treats fascia like packaging material from an Amazon box—some surgeons just cut it out and leave it on the operating table. So the only medical video on YouTube about fascia is called, “Strolling under the Skin” by a surgeon in Europe. (29 mins)
Carbon Fibers
Our fascia fabric is woven together with threads made from a protein called Collagen. Collagen threads have a triple helix weave pattern which means they don’t stretch along their longitudinal axis. This gives them very high tensile strength.
In the previous story, “Our Cell Machinery”, we learned that the average human is 60% water, 20% fat, 15% protein, and 5% minerals. Well, collagen is 30% of all proteins, which makes it the most abundant protein in our bodies. It’s incredible that all those little micro machines know how to lock themselves together and then braid themselves into fiber optic threads. 🤯
Our bodies weave the collagen threads into all kinds of intricate patterns to create sheets of varying elasticity. The collagen sheets in our Ligaments and Tendons are arranged with long, parallel fibers that act like industrial strength rubber bands. The stretch in some of these weaves can withstand 1000 pounds of force. 🏋️♂️
In contrast, the collagen weaves used in our Bones are designed to be incredibly stiff. These sheets have earthly minerals embedded in them like calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, sodium and potassium to give them additional strength and rigidity, just like carbon fiber. Our bones are basically “calcium fiber” instead of “carbon fiber”. Actually, when we consider the fact that carbon atoms are 50% of collagen’s molecular weight, our bones actually are carbon fiber.
Maybe the most surprising thing about our ligaments, tendons, and bones is how they work together. Remember the skeleton guy from biology class who had hinges between the bones for joints?
It’s natural to think that’s how our robot works, but it’s actually backwards. Our ligaments and tendons aren’t holding our bones together, they are equally pulling all our bones apart, all at the same time. This design principle is known as Tensegrity. Here is a more accurate model of how our skeleton works.
See how the bungee cords keep the wooden bones from ever touching each other? Our ligaments and tendons use this tension to stay “loaded” with potential energy all the time. Tensegrity is a big reason why the human body is so energy efficient. The average person weighing 150 lbs only needs the calories inside an apple to move their bodyweight one mile.
If you want to keep learning about our fascinating fascia, check out the book “Anatomy Trains: Myofascial Meridians for Manual and Movement Therapists” by Thomas Myers.
@cybernerds: Our bodies are very energy efficient, but we are no match for the new robots from Tesla and Figure. A Tesla bot uses 500 watts to walk, and walks about 1.5 miles per hour. At $0.13 cents per kilowatt hour, it only costs about $0.04 cents to move each robot one mile. Compare that to the average price of an apple, which is about $0.75 cents.
So the reason robots will replace all of us in the economy is because they work ten times more efficiently than us already. Plus, the price of apples is going up while the price of electricity is going down because of wind and solar. Ironically, the price of apples won’t start coming back down until we get all the humans out of the supply chain. 😳
Digging into Fascia
Tensegrity works amazingly well, but only when all the tension in our bodies is symmetrical. I learned this lesson the hard way because my spine is not very symmetrical. I received permanent damage to my left rib cage before I learned to walk as a baby, so all my muscles had to adapt. As a kid, I was diagnosed with an extreme umbilical hernia, scoliosis, and kyphosis—which is just a fancy way of saying I am a partial hunchback. 😁
I was unable to fully exhale on my left side until I was 45 years old. My left pec minor, left oblique muscle, gall bladder, and right glute minor were all completely paralyzed. Doctors didn’t know what to do about the paralysis in my digestive tract, so surgeons just cut my gall bladder out. The cork screw twist in my torso meant that my shoulders and hips were never in the right place when I moved, which caused a lifetime of serious joint pains. 😣
@bodymechanics: The corkscrew twist in my spine was so bad that my xyphoid process was permanently pinned against my right rib cage and my coccyx was fused to my left glute. This created a deviated septum in my nose (to the left). So whenever I work on anyone new, I look at their nose from above their head to see which way their face is being pulled across their skull. The scalenes on the short side always have all kinds of problems.
I began seriously researching fascia in 2018 after hearing a story about a physical therapist who could completely cure “golfer's elbow” with only a paper cup and a box of pencils. I was intrigued. Before this therapist treated her patients she always warned them, “I can cure your golfer’s elbow, but you are going to hate me for it.” Before each appointment, she filled the paper cup with water and placed it in a freezer. During the appointments, she would peel away the paper rim and use the ice to completely numb the elbow. Then she took the eraser end of the pencils and dug them deep into the elbow—twisting, smashing, and grinding up all that bad fascia. Over the next few days, the patient’s body flushed out all that damaged fascia and rebuilt itself, just like our DNA is pre-programmed to do. So the important lesson to learn here is that trauma sometimes leads to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but more often it leads to Post Traumatic Growth (PTG).
I liked this idea, but as a scientist I wanted more datapoints. So I setup an elaborate experiment to test how various forms of healthcare treated bad fascia. Over the next 12 months, I presented the exact same story about pain in my left elbow to experts in almost every kind of fascial therapy I could find:
Orthopedic surgeon
Physical Therapy
Thai massage
Chiropractors
Chinese acupressure massage
Rolfing Structural Integration
Postural Restoration Institute (PRI)
Active Release Therapy
Ayurvedic massage
Pilates
QiGong
Tai Chi
Yoga
Bowen Therapy
Gua Sha Scraping
Chinese Cupping
Swedish massage
Craniosacral massage
Ashiatsu
Neufit electrotherapy
Each of these professionals prescribed a different remedy based on what they thought was the root cause. The orthopedic surgeon wanted to inject my elbow with Cortizone to numb the pain. The physical therapists massaged and flexed the tendonitis immediately surrounding my elbow. The active release therapists stretched the fascia along my forearm and tricep muscles. The Rolfers focused on mobilizing the fascia in my shoulder and wrist. Chiropractors thought the problem was in my spine. Thai massage focused on my sacrum. Ashiatsu massage focused on the “meridians” or lines of force that travel along my entire body. Chinese acupressure is similar and worked my elbow problem all the way down to my feet. So my takeaway from this experiment was:
The more “Western” the medicine, the less it cares about fascia. The only thing I like about Western medicine today are the advanced machines, like MRI scanners, and the drugs. Western medicine is so good at managing pain, that sometimes pain is the only thing they try to manage. How does a cortisone shot correct the underlying structural issues caused by repetitive stress?
Pains in the Neck and Everywhere Else
Most of the professionals I encountered in this research are “cash medicine” in America, so I was able to interview them for a full hour. Fortunately, I had the research budget to invest in this because when health insurance pays for our healthcare, we only get 6-8 minutes with each doctor. #murica
My first good interview came from Steve Cuddy in Austin, who is certified by the Postural Restoration Institute (PRI). Cuddy told me that almost all our aches and pains are caused by 1 of 3 things:
our eyes
our lungs, or
our teeth.
That seemed way too simple, so I asked him to prove it to me. Cuddy had me stand up straight, squeeze my teeth together slightly, and look down at the floor. He asked, “Which leg is carrying more of your weight?” I was leaning on my right leg so strongly that my left knee was slightly bent. Then he said, “Okay, look up and open your mouth”. He placed a tongue depressor in the left side of my mouth and asked me to bite down again. He said, “Okay, look down again”. Without noticing it, my weight had shifted onto my left leg so strongly that my right knee was now bent. I immediately asked him to do it again, like a kid watching street magic. 🪄
Our teeth and our tongues influence the motion and balance of our entire bodies because they are integral to the Vestibular System. Lines of tension from everywhere in our bodies travel up through the neck and merge behind our jaws. Our brains subconsciously control our bodies like a marionette puppet from the Hyoid bone. So if you have a pain anywhere in your body, you’ll also have a pain somewhere in your neck.
@biblenerds: The tongue really is the rudder of the body like it says in James 3. It’s not just a metaphor.
When you see Michael Jordan dunking a basketball, the shape of his tongue is revealing exactly what his brain is telling his body. ⏩
Our tongue posture even affects the shape of our face. Here’s a short video to teach you proper tongue posture. (5 mins)
All of my fascia research since my interview with Cuddy has only confirmed exactly what he told me years ago. Take our eyes for example. Our bodies will do whatever they have to do to keep our eyes level and steady at all times. Your eyes are probably level right now, regardless of what position your body is in. Here is a video of a cheetah running in slow motion. Just watch how hard this animal’s body works to keep its eyes level and steady at full speed. (4 mins)
So here’s how keeping your eyes level can become a problem. Let’s say that you naturally prefer the left side of your sofa when watching TV. When you lean up against the left arm rest, your brain will subconsciously change the energy distribution in all of your muscles to keep your eyes level. When your spine leans to the left, the right side of your neck will automatically become slightly shorter than your left.
Not a big deal, right?
If your “Netflix and chill” is 2-3 hours per day like everyone else, that’s 2-3 hours per day of flexing your right neck muscles slightly harder than your left. After a few weeks of doing absolutely nothing wrong, your neck muscles are now “asymmetrically strong”. The problem is when you stand up straight, the left side of your neck now has to work harder than the right to keep your eyes level. So by the time you get back home at the end of each day, you literally have a pain in the neck. You can massage it or stretch it, but eventually you will sit back down in your favorite spot and unconsciously make the problem worse.
In the book “Anatomy Trains”, Thomas Myers demonstrates how repetitive behaviors create asymmetric strength using a dissection from a bus driver in LA. Bus routes are primarily designed to make right hand turns, so you can see the fascia powering his left shoulder was much stronger than the right. His body actually grew additional fibers to help him make those turns.
Repairing Bad Fascia
The reason we lose flexibility and range of motion as we age is because our fascia prefers to trade “complexity of motion” for “specialization of motion”. As we can see from the bus driver, our bodies constantly tailor the shape of our fascia wetsuits to make it easier for us to repeat our most common motions in the future.
Whenever the body wants to make a muscle stronger, it shortens the muscle. In the example of watching TV from the left side of the couch, remember how the right neck muscle became shorter than the left? Strong muscles are strong muscles, but also “short muscles” are strong muscles. Bodybuilders have muscles so short that they can barely move. Their short muscles create explosive power, but they are completely exhausted after about 30 seconds.
By contrast, the “long muscles” of ballerinas can lift their entire body weight for an entire ballet.
This is why it’s important for us to practice Yoga or Tai Chi every day as we age—they create “complexity of motion”. Yoga and Tai Chi will keep your body young and nimble as long as you practice them, so the first way to repair bad fascia is to actually use it thoroughly. This is easier said than done, so find a Yoga or Tai Chi class near you.
The second way to repair bad fascia is myofascial release. After a few years of studying fascia and the various ways to improve it, I began training as a Rolfer in 2020. Rolfing Structural Integration is the only intervention that I have found that addresses every malfunction of our fascia including injuries, repetitive stress, and developmental abnormalities.
Rolfing was invented by a brilliant woman named Ida Rolf 🤩. She was born in 1896 and earned a PhD in Biochemistry from Columbia University before women in America had the right to vote. Here is a 2-min video to show you what Rolfing looks like.
Our fascia fabric constantly adheres to itself to shorten our muscles, but these adhesions occasionally come from injury. Rolfing manually separates these adhesions to return our joints and muscles to their prior state. Rolfing actually makes our joints and muscles “younger” than they are today.
For the last three years, I have practiced rolfing on myself, my wife, and our kids for at least two hours every single day. Most importantly, for the first 18 months, I practiced WITH MY EYES CLOSED. Spending an hour each day in forced blindness changed my life.
It all started when I asked one of my myofascial coaches, “Why does it seem like you have x-ray vision? Like, how did you know my leg was going to hurt right there before you got to the spot?” She said, “Well, it’s interesting you say that. The lady who trained me was blind. I asked her almost the same question. She said that I needed to stop seeing with my eyes and start seeing with my hands, so she challenged me to work with my eyes closed. If you are really serious about improving your game, you should work on yourself with your eyes closed.”
So I did.
For months I felt like a clumsy idiot. I dug my fingers into my knees, elbows, and armpits to trace the lines of tension that ran throughout my fascia. Wherever I found adhesions, I pinned them while I moved the joints on either side of the adhesion to learn where all the unnatural twists in my body went. It took months, but eventually my brain built a 3-D mental map of the human body that’s really difficult to describe. It is kind of like becoming fluent in a foreign language. Now, when I feel someone’s forearm muscle, for example, I somehow know exactly what’s wrong with their shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles.
Today, I also use a cadre of specialized tools that aid myofascial release. I store them in our living room so they are never more than a few feet away. They include: Therabands, Hip Hook, Pso-back, Thrival Meat Grinder, fused lacrosse balls, foam rollers, Chinese cups, Gua sha scrapers, Hypervolt percussion gun, pneumatic posture pump, Hip Ball, Nuckle, Rotater Reliever, Yoga Toes, Chirp wheels, Pelvic Clock, Castleflexx calf stretcher, DoubleUp Roller Vice and the Blackboard foot trainer. I also have a Rogue Fitness pull up bar mounted in my living room that my kids and I hang on every day.
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