Anna Atras Training

This is Part 2 of a series on fascia. If you missed Part 1 — what fascia is, how it works, and why it matters – read this blog post.

How Fascia Changes With Age

Fascia is not static. It remodels continuously – every day, in response to movement, load, and the demands placed on it. But the quality of that remodelling changes over time.

In younger tissue, fibroblasts are active, collagen fibres are long and well-organised, and hyaluronic acid – the lubricating gel between fascial layers – is plentiful. The tissue is hydrated, elastic, and responsive. Layers glide freely against each other. The fascial web can store and release kinetic energy like a spring, transmit force efficiently, and recover from load.

With age, several things happen simultaneously. Collagen cross-linking increases, making the tissue progressively stiffer and less pliable. Hyaluronic acid production declines, reducing the glide between layers – the fascial equivalent of oil becoming sludge. Fibroblast activity slows, meaning the remodelling process becomes less responsive to demand. And because fascia adapts to exactly the demands placed on it, decades of repetitive movement patterns in restricted planes create a fascial web that is dense and organised in some directions and adhesed and stagnant in others.

Thomas Myers describes fascia as having a “Zone 3” – areas of the body that never move, have no sensory map in the motor cortex, and therefore never register as painful or restricted. They simply accumulate. With age, Zone 3 expands unless deliberately addressed.

Up to 85% of people over 65 have myofascial pain. That figure is not incidental – it is a decades-long accumulation of fascial change going unaddressed.

The important point is that the tissue remains responsive. Myers describes rebuilding his own tendon elasticity from what felt like “a Tempur-Pedic mattress” to something closer to a metal spring — over months of appropriate training. Fascial adaptation does not disappear with age. It slows, and it requires more deliberate stimulus to trigger.

How to Train Fascia — and Make the Layers Glide

Myers identifies four distinct properties of fascia, each requiring a different approach: plasticity, elasticity, glide, and remodelling. Most training addresses none of them specifically.

Elasticity – rebuild the spring

Fascial elasticity is the capacity to store and release kinetic energy. It declines with age and with inactivity. The specific stimulus to rebuild it: short, cyclic, quickly repeated movements. Elastic energy is stored and released by fascia in under 1.2 seconds – if the movement lasts longer, the plasticity properties take over and the tissue stretches rather than springs.

Bouncing, light skipping, forefoot jogging, rebounding, wall-bounce drills for the upper body. Not intense – frequent and cyclic. Myers is specific: train on hard surfaces, not soft ones. If the surface absorbs the impact, the elasticity training is happening in the environment, not in you.

This takes 6 months to 2 years to produce meaningful change. It cannot be rushed.

Plasticity — sustained stretching for lasting length change

A 90-second sustained stretch creates a genuinely different fascial response than a quick stretch and release. Under slow sustained load, the overlapping collagen fibres slide along each other and reform their lateral bonds in the new position – a permanent length change at the tissue level.

Research (Warneke et al., 2024) confirms this: fascial stiffness changes, not muscle stiffness changes, are what drive genuine range of motion improvement. Static stretching produced significant fascial stiffness reductions; dynamic stretching did not.

The caveat from Stuart McGill: stretch the spring away and all you have left is muscle. Plasticity and elasticity need to be developed together. A body that can reach extreme ranges but cannot stabilise within them is not a healthy fascial system – it is a hypermobile one.

Glide — squeeze the sponge, and squeeze it unusually

Fascial layers need to slide freely against each other. The mechanism that maintains this is movement – specifically, compression and release. Myers: “You cannot hydrate fascia by drinking water. Water goes to the circulatory system. The only way to hydrate stagnant tissue is to squeeze it.“

The critical addition: squeeze it unusually. Routine movement hydrates the zones you already use. Zone 3 – the areas that never move – stays congested regardless of how much you exercise, because the right vector is never applied. The practical prescription: deliberately move through unfamiliar ranges. Arm on the wall rotated past the comfortable point. A new floor position. A different grip. Movement the body hasn’t visited in months or years. “Do your yoga badly twice a week,” Myers says – deliberately varying the form rather than repeating the same sequence.

For releasing existing restrictions: slow sustained pressure into the tissue (not fast rolling) held for 2–3 minutes. The Stecco fascial manipulation method uses pressure rather than tension to release fascial layers, and sonoelastography research shows measurable reductions in stiffness as a result. Roll the full fascial chain when something is restricted – foot, calves, hamstrings, glutes, lower back – because a restriction anywhere typically reflects tension throughout the whole line.

Remodelling — support the process

Fascia remodels during recovery, not during training. The stimulus comes from movement and load; the structural rebuilding happens afterward, primarily during sleep.

Nutritionally, the tissue requires: vitamin C (essential for collagen synthesis – taken around two hours before training specifically enhances the post-exercise collagen production window); collagen as a direct building substrate; and reduced refined sugar, which Myers identifies as the primary dietary driver of fascial dysfunction – sugar increases the stickiness of mucopolysaccharides, the binding gel within the fascial matrix, reducing glide between layers.

Fascia also responds poorly to chronically elevated cortisol. More than 40% of fascial tissue is innervated by sympathetic nerve fibres. A nervous system stuck in a persistent low-grade stress state suppresses fibroblast remodelling activity – meaning the tissue is receiving load stimulus but cannot properly adapt to it. Recovery is not a secondary concern. It is the mechanism by which all fascial training actually works.

Fascia and the female body

Fascia contains oestrogen and progesterone receptors – which means its mechanical properties are hormonally responsive in a way that has no equivalent in male physiology.

Oestrogen increases fascial laxity: greater pliability, reduced structural tension, looser connective tissue throughout the system. Progesterone stabilises: it counteracts oestrogen’s loosening effect and increases tensional integrity across the fascial web. In a healthy hormonal balance, these two are in constant counterplay. When that balance shifts – as it does across the menstrual cycle, across perimenopause, and definitively at menopause – the mechanical properties of the fascial system shift with it.

During high-oestrogen phases, ankle stiffness and Achilles tendon strength measurably decline, ACL injury risk peaks (studies confirm this is cycle-phase dependent, not anatomical), and the connective tissue provides less structural support to joints throughout the body. In perimenopause, anovulatory cycles – where no progesterone is produced at all – create extended, unpredictable windows of unopposed oestrogen and maximum laxity.

After menopause, oestrogen loss accelerates fascial ageing: collagen synthesis slows, hyaluronic acid production declines, and the anti-inflammatory function that both hormones provided is gone — driving the fibrosis cycle of inflammation → excess collagen deposition → tissue thickening → restricted mobility → more pain. This is the biology behind the joint pain, instability, and sudden increase in soft tissue injuries that many women in their late 40s and 50s experience without clear explanation. Training through these phases requires awareness of what the tissue can and cannot provide at any given time – not less movement, but movement selected with the current hormonal environment in mind.

Fascia ages predictably – and responds to the right stimulus at any age. For women, the hormonal layer is not a footnote: it directly alters the mechanical properties of connective tissue across every phase of life.