Fascia and Load
Fascia and load - the conversation we’re not having
Load isn’t something we add, it’s something we never escape
When talking about load in terms of human movement or function we tend to think or refer to it as something external to ourselves;a weight lifted, a force applied, a stress imposed on an otherwise neutral system.
This definition works well enough for bridges, shelves, and engineering diagrams, but falls down somewhat when applied to living bodies.
In reality a human body is never actually unloaded. Gravity doesn’t clock off when movement pauses and muscle tone doesn’t vanish if we sit still.Posture itself is a form mechanical demand on the body and the moment we accept this a subtle but important shift in perception happens and a different statement can be made.
Not moving isn’t the absence of load, just a different kind
This matters because many of the ways we explain stiffness, restriction and tissue adaptation rests on the mistaken idea that load only arrives when we move or add weight or pressure.(Gooyers et al., 2012)
In rehabilitation, movement education and manual therapy, stiffness is often described as the result of not enough load, giving rise to terms such as ‘weakness,’ ‘under-use’, ‘de-conditioning’ and so forthThe predictable prescription, which is generally to ‘add load back in,’ skips something fundamental.
Load is a requirement, not an event
If I stop moving my head and neck, the five kilogram mass of my head doesn’t just disappear and still must be held in space above my neck and shoulders.The cervical spine still has to prevent collapse and connective tissues all the way down to my feet, are still involved in a continuous tensional relationship. The system still has to solve the mechanical problem it’s presented with and the only thing that has changed is how the load is managed.
Stillness doesn’tremovedemand, itconcentratesit
We can from here think of load in a biological system as not just a specific event but instead as being the requirement placed on tissue to maintain form, orientation, and function over time.This requirement exists whether movement is present or not.
From this perspective, any kind of sustained posture whether active or passive, possesses its own levels of mechanical volume but is never silent.Holding stillness is just as much an instructive stimulus to connective tissues as lifting weight, if not more so when duration is concerned especially where adaptability of tendons is concerned, and this is where the familiar laws of tissue adaptation begin to look different. (Wang et al., 2012)
Connective tissue is sensitive to duration not just magnitude.
Wolff’s law, developed by the German Anatomist Julius Wolff, states that bone in a healthy animal adapts to different loads and that loading a specific bone will result in the bone becoming stronger over time.(Julius Wolff Institut (JWI)
It’s not just bone. Henry Gassett Davis was a 19th century American orthopaedic surgeon who pioneered the use of traction and was the inspiration for Davis’s law.(Anon, 2025) This states that soft tissues also heal along lines of mechanical stress, with the words stress and load being interchangeable here. The amount or degree of ‘stress’ appears to be less important than the duration, and suggests that low grade loads, held for long periods may be more instructive to connective tissues than intermittent high ones.
How long and how often, trumps how much and how hard
It’s the strategy that counts, not just the degree of load or force. If a joint is habitually held in one position, the connective tissues around it adapt accordingly. This doesn’t happen because the system is lazy, but because it is extremely efficient. It lays down collagen where tension is present or predicted and takes away slack if it’s not required. The result is that surfaces that usually glide are instructed not to allow this to happen and eventually lose the ability to do so.Stiffness isn’t then not enough load, but instead not enough variability on how the load is experienced. The term ‘lack of load’ when considered from this perspective, can be changed to a ‘lack of change in loading patterns.’
Movement doesn’t just add load, it shifts and redistributes it. The more varied the movement, the more constantly changing patterns are created, changing the story on a constant basis.
When our head changes position or in any way moves through space, the same mass is present, but the demand migrates to different areas, with different fibres being asked to contribute to stability and different layers experiencing shear.
Fascial fibres in particular seem to care deeply about this variation. Fascia isn’t just a passive wrapping, but behaves as a tissue that organises force across time. It tolerates load best when that load is varied, directional, and negotiable.(Schleip et al., 2021)
Static load can teach tissues to brace, but dynamic load teaches them to converse.
It’s worth being very clear that this is NOT an argument against strength or strength training in any way!Resistance training, loading protocols, progressive overload and all the other approaches around rehabilitation and strengthening are all tools that matter hugely.
Instead I want to simply challenge the idea thatload begins when exercise startsand suggest that an upright body has already been solving a mechanical problem long before we add a kettlebell into the mix.
If we miss that, we misunderstand why some people become stiffer despite being “inactive,” and why others feel relief not from adding strength, but from restoring movement patterns.
A lot of discussions of fascia and load focus on force transmission, elasticity, or energy storage, all of which are useful albeit incomplete ideas. What often gets overlooked is how fascia adapts to being asked the same question repeatedly.
‘Hold this shape,’‘Maintain this orientation’, ‘Resist this drift. Over time, fascia answers by simply becoming better at sayingnoto change.If we can understand this, we can shift how we think about stiffness, pain and even resilience. Some restrictions aren’t failures of the tissue’s capacity to respond, but demonstrations of how well they already have. People move differently in pain, and this is always has the potential to impact how tissues will be laid down for the future.(Hodges and Tucker, 2011)
So why does any of this matter? If stiffness is framed purely as under-loading, the potential is to chase intensity.If instead we think of it as a result of constancy, we can choose variation instead.This has the potential to change assessment of pain patterns, cueing in movement therapies and how we think about rest, posture, and “doing nothing.”
Sometimes the most loading thing a tissue experiences all day is stillness.
References and further reading
Anon (2025) ‘Davis’s law’,Wikipedia[Online]. Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Davis%27s_law&oldid=1323304426 (Accessed 19 January 2026).
Julius Wolff Institut (JWI) - Center for Musculoskeletal Biomechanics and Regeneration - Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (n.d.)Julius Wolff: Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin[Online]. Available at https://jwi.charite.de/en/about_us/julius_wolff (Accessed 19 January 2026).
