Back in 2014, when I was still teaching a lot of yoga and also working one on one with clients with various postural and pain issues, I bought a copy of Thomas W. Myer’s book Anatomy Trains: Myofascial Meridians for Manual and Movement Therapists. This book instantly caught my attention, and has kept it! Thomas Myers is a well known researcher and body worker who trained with Ida Rolf in structural integration, which is also sometimes known as rolfing.
I thought my anatomy knowledge was pretty good back then (hubris!!) but Tom Meyer’s book opened my eyes to a whole new realm of knowledge. The interconnected nature of muscles and their surrounding fascial tissue had been mapped out! Like all maps, these ones are continuing to be revised, and their relevance has been largely corroborated by dissection evidence. At the beginning of this year I set the intention to finally meet and study with Tom, as his book has so deeply influenced my thinking and the evolution of my therapeutic practice. I was excited to discover that he was coming to Burlington to teach a course on my absolute favourite chapter of this book, the Deep Front Line. It felt like fate was smiling on me.
Anatomy Trains, the book, tracks the strong, continuous fascial connections between muscles that allow them to act as functional units and help to organize our movement patterns. If you are wondering what fascia is, take a look at this Cleveland Clinic article. The Deep Front line is the deepest and most intrinsic of these lines myofascial line – including the deep muscles of the thighs and pelvic floor, the psoas and diaphragm, the connective tissue around the heart, the jaw muscles and the tongue. The dissection image from Tom Myer’s book has been used a multitude of times to illustrate these connections.
Why does The Deep Front Line interest me so much? Three main reasons come to mind:
- The muscles and fascia of the Deep Front Line comprise those that drive some of the most essential functions of the body, including breathing, chewing and swallowing, standing and walking.
- In the abdomen, it provides a structural framework to support the suspended ligaments of the abdominal organs.
- This “train” of muscles and fascia is appropriately named DEEP and is a huge player in our most basic forms of reflexive stability in simple movements like rolling over, standing, sitting, and walking.
- Much of my work focuses on how the nervous system organizes motor control – and the more sensory nerve endings a structure has, the bigger a player it is in this informational/organizational system. Some of the structures of the Deep Front Line are the most densely ennervated in the human body, like the tongue, and so have a massive impact on how movement is organized.
The three day course didn’t introduce much new material to me, as I’d already studied the text book thoroughly, and have been inspired to read more deeply into the topic in other important texts. But I got a chance to see how Tom himself uses these techniques. And most importantly, I got to geek out, eating pastries and doing body work, with the writer of one of my very favourite books in the world, and meet a whole lot of other bodyworkers who also think his work is important. This fan girl is very happy, and will continue to make annotations in the margins of this text for years to come.