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Child: Welcome to my mommy’s podcast!
Katie: This episode is sponsored by Just Thrive Health, one of my favorite companies, and especially their new Digestive Bitters. So I’ve been talking about gut health for years before it was so trendy. I love that everybody’s talking about it now, and the one brand that I have continuously used for my gut health is Just Thrive.
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Katie:?Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama. com, and I am here today with Erica Ziel to talk about all things fascia and how this can help your body get out of pain. And if like me, you didn’t have a deep understanding of fascia going in, I found this episode so fascinating and potentially a huge missing piece for a lot of us when it comes to pain and to health and to nervous system health and a lot of other things.
Erica’s expertise on this is so fascinating. She’s a leading expert on deep core, fascial, and pre and post-natal training with over 20 years of experience. And she’s also the founder of Core Athletica and owner of Core Athletica Pilates Studio. And she’s helped thousands of women with this very particular topic.
Also stay tuned for a second episode with her where we go even deeper on the pelvic floor and deep core aspect, but in this episode, you will learn so much about fascia and how it relates to the health of your whole body, including how we can actually create new fascia and strengthen our fascia even as we age.
So let’s jump in.
Erica, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Erica: Well, thank you, Katie, so much for having me.
Katie: I’m so excited for today’s topic, which is going to be all things fascia and especially how it relates to pain and more specifically, how we can use the power of understanding fascia to help our body release pain and not be in pain anymore. And like I said, I’m so excited for this on a personal level because I have done some research on fascia and by no means, know nearly enough.
And so I’m really excited to learn from you about this, especially because the little bit I know, it seems like fascia is tremendously important and potentially a huge key that a lot of people don’t really know about or understand, and that this missing piece might be really vital for a lot of us. So for anybody like me who doesn’t have a deep understanding already, can you explain what fascia is and a little bit about how it plays such a vital role in our overall health and in our body.
Erica: Well, absolutely. So I could talk for hours about fascia. So I’ll try to keep it to our cliff notes version. So fascia, how I like to explain it to my clients and to think about, is it’s really the fascia, the tissue that connects our entire body together. So fascia wraps around all of our muscles, every single muscle spindle in our body. It wraps around our nerves, which this is a really key piece to understand when we are talking about how can understanding our fascial system help us to prevent and get rid of aches and pains in the body. Fascia wraps around all of our organs of our body. It really connects us from our toes all the way through the top of our head.
And I always like to talk about fascia as really our body’s superpower. So some cool things about fascia is that we can create more fascia and we can create stronger fascia with the right movement techniques. Now, if we’re not doing movement or we’re more sedentary, fascia tends to be all like kind of muddled up and tight and restricted in our body.
And that can be a piece that keeps us in pain. When we learn how to move with fascia in mind, this elongation and lengthening our body, which I know we’ll talk more of, then we start to train our fascia to work better and work for our body instead of restricting and holding us down.
Katie: That’s so fascinating. And I didn’t know that we could actually create new fascia. It makes sense we could strengthen it, but that’s really exciting that even as we’re getting older, it’s not something that like, it goes away or you necessarily lose it, but we can actually, like, it seems like it’s fluid and can be strengthened and even made new.
That’s really, really exciting. And from what I’ve read, a little bit I’ve researched also, it’s seems like fascia is really intricately involved with sort of the whole body communication and electrical communication within the body. And even in coaching, I’ve heard a lot of talk about muscle driven athletes versus fascial driven athletes and how you can see a difference when you see those athletes who are like really fascially connected and just how they move with seemingly so much ease, even at really high speeds.
But can you speak a little bit more about how we can actually build new fascia and or strengthen our existing fascia?
Erica: Yeah, absolutely. So kind of what you hit on is we can focus on being strong in our body from a muscular perspective, lifting weights, body weight things, stuff like that. But we can also learn to do it in a way where we focus more on connecting through our fascia. So like you said, Katie, when you see athletes move that have really done more fascial work in their body, they move with this fluidity and grace.
And that’s what we want in our body. That’s what I teach my clients to do. And so we can train our fascia. So think of it this way. If we’re sitting all day and we’re really crunched down in our body, one: we’re not able to breathe really well, our fascia then is training itself to be tight and restricted and all kind of muddled down and jammed up. Right?
But just a simple thing such as, okay, I’m sitting right now. If I’m sitting up nice and tall, I am training my fascia to be elongated and to hold my spine to keep space between the bones of my body as well as the nerves. So right? When you kind of talk about the energetic system, we know energy actually runs through our fascia itself.
As well as I like to even dive deep and say like we… and there is actually some research to back this up, the emotional piece of it as well. And so that kind of idea of if we’re crunched down all day, we’re holding and we’re restricting and we’re not allowing good energy flow, good breath. And we’re not working to relieve… we might be holding more junky emotional stuff in our body, where if we start to lengthen our body, we’re training that fascia to become stronger in a lengthened position.
And so fascia will form the way that our body moves. So when we start thinking about just our daily movement, how are we holding our body? How are we moving? Fascia is continuing because of cellular rejuvenation, right? So much of our body is made up of fascial tissue that it’s either as it’s rejuvenating, it’s going to want to rejuvenate better, the healthier we are, the better we teach our body to move and breathe. And then there’s a brain connection, right? We talk about a mind body connection.
There’s actually, I would say when we get into the fascial world, I actually like to look at it more from that body mind. And Joe Dispenza, not to get too deep into that work, but Joe Dispenza talks about that a lot from that quantum physics energy perspective, and I see that wholeheartedly when it comes to movement. So when we’re thinking about, you know, how are we moving through a day? How are we working out? Are we moving from a way that we’re wanting to work with our body and being gentle? Or are we trying to force our body? And that’s the biggest thing I’ve learned with tissue and the research is out there that gentle, and like this kind of idea I like to talk about, less can be more.
And time and time again, I’m all about like, let’s do things that are effective for our body. But we’re so ingrained in we have to work hard or go home, right? If we don’t feel the burn, it’s not working for us. And that’s actually not true. And that actually is what keeps a lot of people and women and moms in particular, I feel like in pain, because we’re so used to, especially those that have grown up as an athlete and want to keep running, want to keep lifting, doing CrossFit, things like that.
Like, I don’t have a problem with any of that. But when we can learn how to move in a much more fascially fluid way, so we’re always elongating our body. Let’s like use a squat, for example, right? It’s a basic movement everybody knows and does. Are we doing a squat from a perspective of just working, like focusing on our glutes, hamstrings, and/or quads? Or are we focusing on what our feet are doing connecting to the ground? What is our pelvic floor and deep core doing? Like are we are we lengthening up out of our pelvis as we lower down into a squat or we compressing our spine and our pelvis and pelvic floor when we go down into a squat.
So the biggest idea you want to think of when training your fascial system, even in a weight training perspective, is that when we’re lifting anything, it could be a kid even, right?
We want to use the tissue from our toes all the way through our core and through the top of our head. So, and this is again, so if we think functional movement, a squat is a functional movement. Moms are squatting all the time, right? We’re always doing squats. So can we do it in a way that’s helping to support our spine, and our pelvis, and our hips, and our neck, and our knees, and all of that? And so that’s a big concept when moms and women can start to figure that out a little bit more and just the awareness of lengthening through their body. That’s a big piece that can really help us to prevent and help move us out of pain because we’re moving our body together.
Whereas if we just lower down in a squat without even consciously thinking about it, then what happens is we compress that spine. And that’s where so many… and tuck the pelvis. And those movement patterns are what contribute to a lot of pain for moms and keep us in pain.
Katie: This is so, so interesting to me. And I remember reading also that we think our skeleton is acutally what holds us up and really it’s just sort of the structure, like the studs a little bit. But in any actual movement, it’s actually our fascia that controls our body and how it interacts with gravity and with the world.
And in that light, I was just thinking like how drastically important that is and how overlooked it is. Like you’re talking about, we have all this focus on strength training, which I agree with you is great and very important. And if there’s this whole other piece that we can understand, then it seems like we can kind of compound the benefits of these movements we’re doing by having this deeper understanding.
And I also love that you talked about the gentleness and like more befriending our body in this approach versus forcing it. It seems like for a lot of women, this is really key. Even as we understand, like, you know, too much of too hard of exercises, probably, especially without our understanding of fascia can actually be a stress on our body, which might be counterproductive to what we’re trying to accomplish.
And so if we can learn more and maybe fascia is that piece of how to befriend our body so that our movements are working with us, to me, that seems like a much easier, gentler path that was going to be more productive longterm. And like you said, moms are squatting and lifting and moving all day long.
So if we’re already doing these things, it’s awesome if we can make them more effective as part of our daily lives. And I’d love to go deeper on the pain side because I would guess a lot of people listening have some form of, you know, nagging random pain somewhere in their body. I know like I store things in my traps, so that’s often where I’ll feel like tightness and different things. I’d love to understand more deeply how fascia relates to this and specifically maybe some examples of ways that we can befriend our fascia and get it on our team in resolving that for the longterm, not just treating the symptoms.
Erica: Yes, great question, Katie. I love this. So let’s start with that trap conversation that you just mentioned, because that is so common, right? The stress, we tend to hold stress up in our neck and in our shoulders. And then we’re like, Oh, that neck pain, that shoulder pain, which can contribute, for some women, it does become very debilitating to them. So when we think of, and it comes down to posture, it comes down to how we’re breathing, how we’re holding our body. So the first thing to help get us out of this tension in the neck is just to think about letting go of our shoulders. And we want to think about holding our shoulders up with actually our rib cage, not with our shoulders.
We tend to do so much moving in our life by just like raising our arm, moving our shoulder instead of like, what is our ribs doing? And I would say as moms, because of pregnancy, and if you’re pregnant right now listening to this, this applies to you too. I see that pregnancy causes such a postural shift for so many women and because unless they’re taught how to minimize those postural shifts during pregnancy or work on rebalancing their posture and these fascial connections after, these postural tendencies can stay, and that is part of what can keep us in pain.
So if you think about that, right, during pregnancy, what happens with the upper body is those shoulders tend to roll forward and up. So we tend to be tight up there just from the pregnancy posture, right? And then add on all the other daily life things. So when we think about relaxing our shoulders, and I want you ladies to then think about like your mid back. So think bra line, like kind of this wrapping sensation around to the front underneath your breasts. You want to like lift your breasts up and forward. You don’t want to just lift because then we tend to pull back.
It’s a lifting up and slightly forward. And what this does is when it’s elongating that fascial tissue, you guys should all be able to feel that, but we start to wake up that deep core a little bit. We get this support from underneath our ribs and our diaphragm. And then we think about, okay, let’s let our shoulders go.
Let’s feel that gentle, keyword gentle, mid back kind of wrapping around to underneath our breasts to hold us up. Then you can now start to feel like, Oh, I can just let my shoulders relax because we’ve been so ingrained to like roll the shoulders, roll the shoulders, jam the shoulders down and back to help with posture. I don’t like that at all because what I see that that does, is it’s not actually going to like the root of fixing that postural imbalance from our rib cage, which then helps us to elongate our neck. If we just jam our shoulders down, I see a lot of people like push their neck forward and they actually tighten in these muscles in the front of their neck even more.
So then what does it do if you jam your shoulders down is it causes all that fascial tissue to just want to hang on for dear life. And that’s kind of the concept that keeps us in pain is when we get that tight, restricted fascia, right? So then we have to think about, well, why is that tissue tight?
Why is that area of my body working so hard to find support? This is where, especially with the neck, the example I’ve given, we’ve got to go lower, find that support from our mid back and our rib cage. So that’s like a piece for this upper body that can be very, very helpful. Another really common area of pain is the low back. I already mentioned a little bit with a squat, but let’s talk about some of the common things I see with my moms is that we tend to get that tucked pelvic position, right? We are queued that a lot in fitness classes. Way back in my early days that’s how I queued cause that’s what I was taught to cue.
Well, quickly I discovered a lot more about pelvic floor, deep core function and fascia, which dramatically changed the way that I trained my clients and it’s getting such better results is that we have to work to untuck our pelvis. So we don’t want to be tucking our pelvis.
Like right now, if you’re sitting and just think about like, find the bony parts underneath your pelvis. If we tuck our pelvis, that’s putting pressure onto our low back and it’s causing for a lot of women, a lot of restriction in their pelvis, their pelvic floor, and their low back. And so anytime we go to move or stand or lift a kid up or carry things, we’re putting so much pressure down on our lower back and our deep core isn’t working at all.
So we just don’t have a stability of our low back. And so I find time and time again, when I work with clients with back pain, they’ve gone to other modalities that focus just on their back. But when I have a client come in or working with someone online, we don’t go to the back first. I’m like, what’s going on with your pelvis?
Where is your pelvic position? That matters more than about anything initially, but then how are you breathing? Because if we are just breathing into our belly all the time, you guys, that’s not giving us that fascial support. So to really activate and help to support our spine, with that strong and lengthened fascia, we have to be breathing better because that breath is going to be key.
So when we’re breathing, we want to think about breathing out to the sides of our ribs and into our back, not just belly breathing all the time. So if every time you inhale, we’re belly breathing and your lower back tissue is already so tight, what keeps happening if we don’t have support inside of our core and the front of our belly, is that back just stays so tight. And a lot of times that restriction in that tissue, like you have to think again, like why is that tissue so tight? It’s hanging on for dear life because it’s lacking support somewhere else. That’s what I like people to start thinking about is, okay, I have an area of tightness. I always like to, and I hear from some people, they want to just stretch that tight tissue, but continuing to stretch that tight tissue, all it does for the most part, for most people, is tell that tissue then later on, I’ve got to be tighter, even tighter, because stretching that tissue didn’t really do anything.
It might’ve given you a little bit of release initially, but ultimately you stretch the low back, for example, and then that feels good temporarily, but then a little time goes and you’re like, Oh, my back’s just tight again. Well, it keeps being tight because it doesn’t have the support from deep in that core. That fascial system isn’t activated enough to give your spine the support it needs. So low back pain is actually usually one of the first pains that I see I can help women get out of because when we look at the full picture of how they’re holding their body, how are they breathing, what’s their pelvic positioning? Then all of a sudden they start to release that tension from their low back. And back to the squatting motion I mentioned earlier, just the simple, like ladies listening, if you just, the next time you go do a squat to do anything, think about just that light lengthening through your body.
So we’re creating that nice space and we’re then more supported between our bones. So Katie, when you were talking about like our bony structure, so many people put too much emphasis on the bony structure. And it’s the tissue that’s creating that space. So we can just think about lengthening as much as we can with gentleness, not like, some people they want to be just be like, Oh, so tight, tight and straight. You don’t want that. It’s like this, like fluidity. You want to be able to find that space and then when we go down into a squat to then pick up a child, that tissue is on lightly to offer us support. So then we go pick up a kiddo or we pick up groceries or whatever we’re doing, we don’t feel that stress in our back. We feel like we’ve got support to actually help us lift up from our core. Can I give one more example? You good with that? Okay.
So another common one I see with my mom’s that can also lead to back pain, pelvic pain, things like that, is the hamstrings. Across the board I see women have really weak hamstrings. But how many of you listening are like, but Erica that doesn’t make sense because my hamstrings always feel so tight. Well tight hamstrings, for the most part are actually weak hamstrings. Going back to this tissue idea of okay, why are the hamstrings so tight?
They’re tight because they’re trying to stabilize your pelvis, trying to keep us upright. So we can actually focus on starting to strengthen our hamstrings more, get more balanced strength in our legs. A lot of women tend to be more quad dominant in the front of their thighs and like their hip flexors, right?
How many of you feel like your hip flexors are just so tight all the time. And they don’t have to be, but we have to look at the opposition of that and like, what are our hamstrings doing? So I love some certain simple movements just to wake up our hamstrings a little bit more and get them stronger because that’s gonna help to give your back the support.
It helps to bring your pelvis more in the right position. And then one last thing with our movement stuff is, work out barefoot, walk around your house barefoot. If you want socks on, that’s fine. Get the toe socks. I always have my clients wear in our Pilates classes is wear the toe socks with grippies if you need to, but using your toes more. As we get a little bit older and I say that, cause I know like our mom population isn’t usually that old, but this dysfunctional movement pattern starts quite young. Like I work with 20 some year olds sometimes. And a lot of times we don’t think about these things affecting us till we’re much older, but the dysfunctional movement starts younger.
So when we can start to use our toes, we don’t wanna walk on our toes, but when we’re walking around our house, like what are your feet doing? When you’re working out, especially if you’re working out at home, use your toes, use your arches. Wake up your feet because that’s going to really help you tap into your fascial system. Because our fascia runs all the way from the tips of our toes, our arches, all the way up our entire back line, up through our pelvis, all the way up to the sides of the top of the head.
So when we can start looking at our movement as a whole and everything working together in this light, lengthening position, it’s amazing how much, well, stronger we get number one, but how much it helps us to start to move out of pain or prevent pain. And a big key of this is gentle. And so it’s so funny to me, like time and time again, when I work with so many athletic moms and they’re used to that intense workout, the initial piece of this, it’s a massive mindset shift. You really have to have this sometimes this internal conversation with yourself that says, okay, I’m, it’s like trusting in almost really what I’m telling you. And just trust in your body that it has the ability to get so much stronger when we actually start to look at movement this way. And then when we go back or we add in our weight training, like initially I always tell my clients, knock your weight down for a while so that you can focus on being able to do whatever exercises you’re doing with this elongation in mind. And then once you get better at that and stronger through your fascial system, then you can work to bump your weight back up and you ultimately can get so much stronger. And I hear it time and time again from clients, but it’s this whole idea of we have to slow down to be able to speed up.
And it’s our brain that fights it, not really our body, it’s our brain.
Katie: Oh, so much good stuff in what you just said. And as you were explaining, even the breathing being such an important part of this, and then really understanding these movements and doing them so intentionally, I was thinking of two particular people, one being a local athlete who I go to the same gym as.
So I see this guy, he’s an absolute beast of an athlete, and he’s not doing these crazy heavy workouts all the time, but he’s so intentional about these movements and the way in making sure that they’re very dialed in. And he does the breathing where he’s breathing deep into his rib cage. And I see him do that even before and after workouts.
And it’s insane, like what he’s able to do in the gym, but it seemingly is probably connected to this. Same with my friend Hunter, whose focus is a lot with, he works with athletes with mobility. And so he’s doing very intentional movement based things. Sounds similar to what you’re talking about.
And he’s the type that can go into any activity, even if he’s never done it before and sort of naturally be great at it because he’s fascially connected. And also anecdotally, he has the highest HRV I’ve ever seen in a person, which I think there might be a nervous system HRV connection here as well that would be interesting to research.
But I would love to hear a little bit more about the stretching aspect and the difference between maybe what people think of when they are stretching, versus this like kind of true stretching that you’re talking about, or like the correct stretching and movements that actually really helps our fascia. What do we need to know when we even just think about stretching that we might have wrong?
Erica: Okay. One thing I want to add on, Katie, because you mentioned about the nervous system, and I will say when you can get deeper into your fascial system, you can help to calm your nervous system. So when we talk about fight or flight all the time, it’s a really, this movement stuff I talk about can really help to calm our nervous system too.
It’s quite fascinating. So we’re talking about stretching and I mentioned a little bit with the hamstrings. So let’s kind of go back to that conversation from a stretching perspective. So everybody knows what like a runner’s hamstring stretches, right? Where you put one leg up on a bench or chair or something like that and you go to stretch. And when I see people do this, it’s like they reach their leg out and they just fold their body up and over. So they might get a little bit of a hamstring stretch. Maybe they actually feel more of it pulling on their low back. And when we do this and we’re just stretching the tissue, but this tissue isn’t actually activated, or lightly supported, then we are leaving our back line of our body susceptible to just that grippy grabbiness of that, like restricted in that tissue that I was kind of talking about earlier. So instead, how I like you to think about stretching, is we want to actually activate the tissue. So we want to feel like our tissue is working lightly in a lengthened position. So let’s take that hamstring stretch. For example, we take our leg out and then think about straightening your leg, but don’t lock out your knees.
Especially for women I see a lot of like hyper extension and locking out our knees. We want to soften our knee and pull our pelvis back, our sits bone back. So we then now are actually going to feel your calf, your hamstring underneath your pelvis is actually working a little bit, but now we’re lengthening and we’re stretching, but with support. And then we want to zip up that belly. So we want to feel like we’re lengthening up through the top of our head. Like I’ve been talking about the whole time, just that nice length. Then from there, if you want to flex up and forward to stretch, you’re not going to go as far because you’re not just collapsing.
We want to be activating that tissue in a lengthened position and then lifting up and over. So we’re reaching from our core and our spine to stretch us, not just feeling like we’re folding forward. And when we do that, you’re going to be training that tissue to be stronger in a lengthened position. That to me is what we should be doing from a stretching perspective. Because if we’re training our fascial tissue… in order to get into your fascial system, it has to be activated, but lightly. So we want to feel like that tissue is lightly activated in a lengthened position. And then we’re telling that tissue, Oh, I want to be supported, but lengthening at the same time. It’s the same if we go to do anything with our back, right? Don’t just collapse forward and stretch your back because then you’re leaving your back vulnerable to that tissue to just grab. We want to always be getting that light length and then moving from there. And it’s a total 180. So much of what I teach is really just, it’s completely opposite of so much of what we’ve been taught about movement and working out and all of that growing up.
So it’s really just, it’s learning. You sometimes have to just think about it. I just tell clients, you’re learning a whole new movement language for your body and that I feel helps people get out of their own way of trying to fight it. But wait, this feels so weird and it feels so different. But I always tell people, if you keep doing what you’re doing and your back is bothering you, your neck, or things like that, then that’s not working for you. So we have to learn how to get deeper into our body to give our body support so that it feels supported in that lengthened position.
So I’m much more on strengthening and lengthening versus just stretching. We don’t ever really just stretch in my world, like that old school stretching.
Katie: That makes sense. And I know you have resources for people to learn actually how to do that. So I’ll make sure those are linked in the show notes as well. And I want to also highlight something you said earlier about how like if we do this the wrong way, sort of like temporarily it’ll help and then the body will snap back and this seemingly like brain and nervous system connection, because I’m a big believer that our body’s always on our side.
And so if we’re having something going on, if we can get curious about it, it’s actually our body communicating with us and there’s something wonderful to learn here. And so it seems like this piece may be a really valuable part of that. And I wonder if it also ties in, you mentioned the emotional side, and I read years ago, I read the book, The Body Keeps the Score, and it really opened my eyes to how much the mind and body were connected in a different way than I had ever understood before. And it seems like with fascia, this is even and especially true…and I’ve even had experiences in body work or work on fascia where like big emotions came up and I got to feel them and work through them, but it seems like this is also maybe something not super well known.
So can you speak more to the emotional connection? And especially for women, how do we be aware of that and address that in a way that’s helpful to our body and our mind?
Erica: Yeah, it’s absolutely. And so something I like to prepare a lot of my ladies for when they start this work is because we do so much in the beginning with the pelvis, pelvic positioning, pelvic floor, things like that, that I do like to prepare everybody that it is very normal to just randomly feel like you need to cry and you may not know why. I’m not a believer that you have to know why, just when you feel that emotion coming up, let it go in a very safe healthy way. And again, sometimes it can be as simple as you had a plan for childbirth and it didn’t go the way that you wanted it to go. But because of that, you’re holding so much tension and restriction in your pelvis, in your pelvic floor, and that can be a piece that’s keeping your body in pain and dysfunctional movement.
So when you can just learn to work with your body, recognize when things are coming up and let’s work to move through them. You don’t have to relive, I’m not a believer that you have to relive anything. Just be like, that’s coming up. And I teach a lot of breath work to help people to move that through breathwork and visualization practices. And it’s so amazing that it’s… but this is the piece, this is the key piece of this is, we have to learn to be gentle with our body. If we’re trying to force our body to do something, that’s keeping us in this emotionally stuck position. And it’s a piece that can be very challenging because again, like I said, it’s like a 180 of how we’re so used to like force our movement and moving. But when we go gentler with our body, it’s calming our nervous system. And because it’s such mindful movement that we’re really doing, it just helps you to connect with your body on a whole new level that you didn’t even know is possible. And I always like to challenge my clients and students.
When I get moms, like they’ll go through my online program postpartum once. And they’re like, my goal is like, I want to rush through it and I just want to do the movement and get done. And yeah, they get results and it helps them feel good. And then they do it again with the next baby. And they’re like, okay, Erica, I’m listening to you a little bit more, like really listening to what you’re saying. And that next time through they’re like, Oh my gosh, like I’m starting to discover new things about my body.
And then sometimes it takes them a third time through it when they’re finally like, okay, I’m going to really trust you and slow down. So take my advice, just do it the first time, like slow down and trust in it. And then, moving forward, because like I said, our brain really likes to fight it. A lot of times when those emotions come up, we tend to like resist that. We don’t want to feel it because it doesn’t always feel good, but when we can learn to let that stuff come up and process it and work it out of our body. That can be a piece that’s keeping us in pain because that emotional restriction is helping to keep that tissue tight. Does that make sense, Katie?
Erica: It totally does. And I know we’re going to get to have a follow up conversation that talks even more about the pelvic floor aspect and the deep core, because certainly this seemingly is something that especially after pregnancy, and I’ve had six of them, like can be something that needs some help or we can support in kind of unique ways.
But for this episode, for anyone listening who maybe has not even been aware of fascia until now, or really resonated with parts you said and recognize, Oh, maybe my lower back, like that could be what’s going on, or seeing ways they can support their body now in new and different ways. Where would be a good starting point for them to keep learning from you or to jump into that?
And I’ll of course link in the show notes as well.
Erica: Yeah. So everything that I teach you can find on my website, it’s ericaziel com. My last name is spelled Z I E L. I also have a free pelvic floor guide on there. That’s where I always send everybody to start, whether you’re postpartum, you’re pregnant, it’s been years since you’ve had a baby or maybe never had a baby, that’s where I always send everyone to get started. So you’ll learn a good array about fascia, some little, some movements to get you started and obviously the pelvic floor.
Katie: Amazing. Well, I will make sure that’s linked in the show notes for any of you guys listening on the go. And tune in for our next episode together because Erica will be back and we’ll talk even more about specifically pelvic floor and deep core. But Erica, for this episode, thank you so much. I am so fascinated by this topic and I learned a lot and I’m very grateful for your time.
Thank you for being here.
Erica: Thanks Katie.
Katie: And thank you for listening. And I hope you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama Podcast.
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