Entangled Athletics

After recovering from my first foot injury (or so I thought), I lacked the effortless speed and bounce I had before. I was transitioning to a slow player. By no means a bad player, but I couldn't easily go past people like I could before. Before, I was always the guy everyone was afraid to go into a tackle with or run against.

Growing up, I wasn't the naturally lean kid. I carried a bit of extra weight around the belly and always a little nervous to have my shirt off around others. Even though I was what you'd call athletic, I don't think I was truly healthy. My parents told me don't worry about it, it'll go away as you get older, It's just baby fat, but it never did.

Looking back, with the knowledge I possess now, this first injury set the stage for so many years of debilitating injuries, niggling pain, and overall lackluster athletic development.

At this point in time, I've returned from Greece. I had a month left of highschool, and then I was done. 18 years old and free to leave. That's what I always wanted. Get my deal playing somewhere in Europe. Anywhere, I didn't care. As long as it was in Europe, and it was professional, I was a go.

It's what every kid dreams of. Hopping on a plane to fly across the world in the search of a pro contract. I had just turned 18 years old and with two months left of high-school, I went for it.

In the mainstream, we are taught to think of the body almost as a brick wall or a house with everything stacked on each other. In early human cadaver research, researchers only knew muscle, bone, organs, etc. Fascia and connective tissue was tossed out as it got in the way. Researchers assumed it was just stuffing and had no actual function. So in normal education, the human body is just thought of as a skeleton with muscles.

Previously muscle was the be all and end all of sports performance. How much force can your muscles produce? How much strength can your muscles exude? How big are your muscles? How fast can your muscles contract? How many fast-twitch muscle fibers do you have? Etc, Etc...

Have you ever head of Proprioception? It's a big word that basically describes how you can feel where you are in space and time. You can test your proprioception with a simple task: close your eyes then touch your nose. You don’t need to look to know where the position of your nose is in space and how to bend your arms.

The human body's ability to mold to the stresses applied upon it is one of our biggest strengths. Your body's ability to remodel tissue in response to activity is largely explained by the viscoelastic properties of fascia.

Fascia is the tough connective tissue that creates a 3-dimensional web extending without interruption from head to toe. Fascia surrounds and infuses every muscle, bone, nerve, blood vessel, and organ, all the way down to the cellular level.