Canadian RMT Fall 2017 CanRMT_Fall_17_FINAL | Page 19

Y
ou hear a lot about tis-
sue hydration these
days, and for sure we’re
all somewhere around 2/3
water. And to quote an old
Bedouin proverb: “Water still, poison!
Water moving, life!” The idea that water
moving through you improves your bio-
chemical turnover, and thus your repair
and recovery is nearly universal - eve-
ryone from your mother to your yoga
teacher (for you millennials, that’s the
same person) is always pushing you to
drink more water.
It’s really hard to over-hydrate (at least
by the time you are school age), so this
is largely a beneficial ‘health tip’, con-
tributing mightily to bright eyes, healthy
skin, and well-flushed kidneys. It’s also
contributing to mountains of Dasani bot-
tles in the landfill, and long lines at the
bathroom.
And there are some misconceptions
involved. The question is not how much
water enters your mouth or exits your
urethra, the question of ‘hydration’ is
really one of ‘perfusion’ - does the water
you imbibe get to the cells who need it?
The pathways of fluid distribution in
your body are well-worn , like streambeds.
You drink the water, it gets taken up in
the gut, passed through the mesentery
into the portal system where it increases
blood volume. Pushed into the 100,000
kilometres of capillaries, the increased
blood volume opens up the garden hose a
bit to allow for better perfusion - pushing
the water around and through more cells.
Most cells are within 4 cells of a capil-
lary. The cells that are 4 cells away form
the capillary are not going to get the
same perfusion / hydration as the cell
that lives right beside the capillary. But
the increased blood volume will push
more blood (and thus more exchange,
more opportunity for health) to the fara-
way cells. Low hydration will do the
opposite - make the garden hose smaller,
the flow more sluggish, and the distant
cells will struggle harder to provide
‘water-based services’ like food delivery
and waste removal.
Even the most prodigious water intake,
however, will not get water to the places
most in need in your body. A second act
must follow, the opening of the tissues -
fascial tissues mostly, though all tissues
benefit - where they have become blocked
by fibres, or clogged with dehydrated glue
(mucopolysaccharides,
glycoaminoglycans) or, in
a word, “snot”.
Opening the specific
tissues in need of extra
hydration requires we
‘squeeze the sponge’ of
the tissue. Squeezing the
sponge pushes the water
out of the tissue so ‘new’
water can be sucked back
in, as when you rinse and
squeeze a kitchen rag
under the tap.
We can squeeze the mus-
cle sponge with exercise,
and that helps squeeze
the fascial sponge as well.
Stretching, especially the
long-held stretches of
yoga, also squeeze the sponge of the fas-
cia, and deep stretches reach into liga-
ments as well.
While these are both beneficial, if you
are pursuing the same exercise regime
day after day, you keep squeezing the
same part of the sponge again and again.
The idea is to get the water into new tis-
sue, and getting the water moving in new
tissue demands that you do new move-
ments - and we tend to be creatures of
habit, aren’t we?
Palpate the upside of your forearm, a
few centimetres below your elbow. Strum
back and forth across the extensor group
of muscles that go to the back of your
wrist. Feel that some of that tissue is
bouncy, hydrated muscle, and some is
stringy, dehydrated tissue. How much
would you have to drink to change that
dry tissue to the more hydrated tissue
that lies just next to it? Yes, that’s right,
no amount of drinking is going to change
it - movement is.
So, the first bit of advice from this
point of view is to keep changing your
movement program. Take up Capoeira if
you’ve been doing Cross-Fit; supplement
your weight-lifting with deep stretches,
do your yoga badly and see if you can
wake up some new tissues. (Of course,
you’ll be waking up new—meaning forgot-
We can squeeze the
muscle sponge with
exercise, that helps
squeeze the fascial
sponge as well.
ten—nerve endings as well as hydrating
tissues, so it’s a double bonus.) Unusual
movements hydrate the ignored nooks
and crannies of your cellular community.
The other process that gets perfusion
and hydration going to the necessary
places is bodywork. A good bodyworker
helps you find dehydrated places (trigger
points are one example in the muscle, but
there are fascial knots and ‘densifications’
as well), and hydrate them with friction,
shearing, melting, or point work. Any of
these can ‘squeeze the sponge’ as well, at
first squeezing out the water, only to have
it be sucked in again when the pressure or
friction is lifted.
Drink all the water you want - but if
it’s going down the same old channels
from throat to bladder, it is maintaining,
but not improving, your health. Health
improvement through hydration / per-
fusion means squeezing the sponge of
your tissues, either through unusual
movement or through the attention from
hands coming from the outside.

FALL 2017
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