Healing Guts and Toning Butts: The Fascia, Core & Gut Reset You Didn't Know You Needed with Dr. Shalini Bhat

So let's talk about the fascial release and chiropractic component of your movement motif, because we shared about this a little bit in the pre-interview chat.

And because of my fitness background and because my clients are lifting heavy and many times doing HIIT and kind of pounding the floor, which I believe is positive for my ladies as they age, but then they're going to the chiropractor and we're dealing with different things.

So share a little bit about the, what is, what is fascial release? What is the value of the type of chiropractic care that you provide?

Yeah.

So I'll just go a step, um, before that and just explain what fascia is for people-

Great

... who haven't heard of it.

So fascia is the fabric all around every single muscle, cell, organ.

Like, every single thing in our body is wrapped in fascia.

So I always give the example of, like, a women's nylon, right? Like, your organs are ...

They'd all fall to your pelvis if they weren't being suspended in something, right? And they're being suspended in that beautiful fabric, and as are the muscles, right? Everyone can picture a chicken breast.

You've got that little film on the top when you sort of pull it off.

Back when we went to school, we were dissecting that film away, and now we're realizing that in vivo, that's actually like a li- liquid fluid matrix that needs to be hydrated, and it's constantly changing.

And if you touch your skin, there's so many different fascial layers all the way down that you can actually manipulate at the cell level from just touching skin.

And what I mean by that is if you picture an orange, you can ...

That's the best sort of way for people to conceptualize how many sort of layers of fascia there are, because you've got the rind, and you peel the rind, then there's that white layer.

Then you go into the wedges, and each wedge is individually sectioned.

And then you get, open the wedge itself and you've got little droplets, right? So every, all of that water that's technically in the orange is suspended in such a beautiful pattern and in a beautiful, um, shape.

Now, if you picture someone smushed the orange from the one side, the water would all be off onto the one side.

Like, that water needs to go somewhere.

So when we're talking about these fabrics, which by the way now, since I went to school, fascia has now been identified as an organ.

They're actually acknowledging that, so no longer dissecting it away, and realizing that when we are, you know, dead or under- which was when we do cadaver work, obviously, or when we are, you know, under anesthetic, that fascia flattens and it's not the same 3D liquid crystalline matrix that it is, um, when you can study someone in vivo.

So we really need to honor this fabric.

And when people are, for example, um, you know, really, really sore or when they can't, when they hit a plateau in something like y- maybe they're trying to get to a certain level of strength or they wanna lift a little bit heavier, and something's in the way.

They can't quite access a certain range of motion or they're getting pain somewhere, or they're getting a buildup of lactic acid, or they're getting something unrelated with invitation marks.