The structure of the connective tissue of the body is a facinating study involving new ideas like “fascintegrity” to describe how the body moves. We can say that the fascia is the basis for the integrity and coordination accross all the body’s organ systems, it is what keeps it all together in the right places. Being incredibly strong, flexible, and elastic, it mediates between better known structures like muscles and bones. We understand how those things are part of any study of martial arts, but do we understand the role that engaging with the body’s connective tissue might play?

A 2019 study coins the term fascintegrity: “We proposed a new term to stimulate further research into the understanding of cellular behaviour and body movement: fascintegrity. The term fascintegrity is the union of the words fascia and integrity. The human body is living integrity allowed by the fascial organization, including liquids and viscera.” (Bordoni B, Varacallo MA, Morabito B, Simonelli M. Biotensegrity or Fascintegrity?. Cureus. 2019;11(6):e4819. Published 2019 Jun 3. doi:10.7759/cureus.4819)

Let me just suggest that “fascinterity” is a far more effective thing to control than either bones or muscles, and engaging with an opponent’s fascia confers a great advantage to those that understand how to do it, an advantage probably greater that other differences like size or strength. In fact, I have come to realize that what we could call fascinterity-inteligence is as big a key to martial arts as the mastery of spiral movements, which I wrote about in my prevoius post. Watch this video to learn more about fascia: