Core Awareness, Revised Edition: Enhancing Yoga, Pilates, Exercise, and Dance

There are three major components to our anatomy that are of particular interest to us as yoga teachers (and students): muscles, fascia/connective tissue and bones. In a very straightforward way we can say that muscles generate forces to move us, fascia resists tensile forces and shapes us, and bones transmit forces to take the burden off muscles.

Remember, one model posits that the purpose of our ligaments is to restrain a joint from moving too far and damaging itself. However, we have seen that often, our range of motion and mobility is too restricted; we are not in danger of going too far—we are suffering from not being able to access our natural and normal range of movement. The only way

The implications of this continuity of tissue were that the separately named muscle-to-tendon, bony periosteum, ligament and joint capsule together formed one continuous architecture. It was thickened, vascularised, innervated and invested with different qualities at different points of connection and disconnection. Nevertheless, the tissue in, aro

What we have to realise is that the contractive power of muscle is completely useless without the tensioning cables of the connective tissues in which the muscle resides. It contracts to tension a tensional network that connects the body to itself and contains everything. It has to pull on something. Thus it is referred to as a pre-tensioned or a p