Spinning a Web - Not muscle, not bone, but fascia the network of tissue that connects it all is grabbing the therapeutic spotlight.

Are you in pain?” Cadence Dubus, a Brooklyn-based fitness instructor who has developed a program for “fascia release,” asks, sending me spiraling before our session begins. There’s that twinge in my shoulder and the carpal tunnel at night—but aren’t such annoyances simply the conditions of modern life, of getting older? “Some,” I answer, shy to cop to any of it. Dubus then has me walk back and forth, squinting at my gait.

- By Chloe Schama

Are you in pain?” Cadence Dubus, a Brooklyn-based fitness instructor who has developed a program for “fascia release,” asks, sending me spiraling before our session begins. There’s that twinge in my shoulder and the carpal tunnel at night—but aren’t such annoyances simply the conditions of modern life, of getting older? “Some,” I answer, shy to cop to any of it. Dubus then has me walk back and forth, squinting at my gait.

Despite her interest in my aches and anatomy, we’re not meeting to tend to my muscles or joints but rather the fascia, or connective tissue, that surrounds them and is spread, weblike, throughout the body. Wrapping your head around its dimensions can be a little confounding, not least because we’ve been conditioned by centuries of anatomical tradition to think less about interconnected systems and more about the parts that make up our bodies. Helene Langevin, the director of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, tells me a story to illustrate the point: When she was in medical school in the 1980s, they would discard fascia tissue in their anatomy labs; it was obscuring the organs that were their focus.