John Sharkey

Brooke Thomas

Brooke Thomas: Today, I’m talking with John Sharkey who is a clinical anatomist, exercise physiologist, and European neuromuscular therapist. He’s developed the world’s only master ’s degree in neuromuscular therapy, which is accredited by the University of Chester (UK). He’s on the editorial boards of the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, International Journal of Osteopathy, and International Journal of Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork.

He’s also a member of the Olympic Council’s medical team and a founding member of the BIG, otherwise known as the Biotensegrity Interest Group. He has also authored or co-authored several books including the third edition of The Concise Book of Muscles. He and I are talking here in great depth about the old paradigm of anatomy and biomechanics and what the new paradigm holds. This is really critical stuff. I believe we’re on the brink of a new understanding of the living human body. We have a lot of fascinating people doing groundbreaking work in this field and it’s time to look at our old models; to look at where they come from and why they’re outdated.

If you’re interested in things like living tissue versus formaldehyde-treated cadavers, biotensegrity versus biomechanics, continuity of form versus origin-insertion, and just how individual human anatomy is and what that changes about our often dogmatic approaches to the body, then this interview should be a treat for you. Thank you so much John, for talking with all of us today.

John Sharkey: It’s a real thrill to be here.

BT: I want to start off with some of your background. I introduced you so people have a sense of your bio, but the one thing I really want to pick out for this conversation is that you’re a clinical anatomist; I want people to have an understanding of what that means. Could you describe the way clinical anatomists earn their stripes, so to speak?

JS: First of all, I’m going to take you back to the mid 70s and then into the late 70s and early 80s. The health fitness industry hadn’t really started yet and I was into running. I just didn’t know at the time that it was called ‘running’. I used to just run from one end of the beach to another with my brother, and the game was really to get from one end of the beach to the other, that’s it. Then that later became known, thanks to Jim Fixx, as ‘jogging’, as ‘running’. I was also lucky enough to meet a group of ladies who were looking for somebody [to] practice their massage techniques on. I offered my body and so I had one person on each foot and one on each hand, somebody massaging my head, and somebody else on my body.

I said, “What’s all this about?” That was my introduction to massage and bodywork therapy, and over the years as I read more articles and got to listen to some of the leaders at the time, I became more aware that there was a big disparity between the medical fraternity and the massage people. In the United States there were people like the structural integrators and so on, but it really hadn’t developed very well over here in Europe yet. I made the decision that physiology and anatomy were going to be the foundation stones upon which I was built. I went into formal studies and gained my undergraduate degrees and then went on to do my postgraduate degrees in both exercise physiology and in clinical anatomy.

[So you posed the question,] “What exactly does the clinical anatomist do?” You’re probably aware that my alma mater is Dundee University in Scotland. In Dundee University the department that we work in is called the Department of Anatomy and Human Identification. Anatomy spawns quite a broad spectrum of speciality. For instance, one of my heroes is Professor Sue Black who is the head of the department. Sue [was] involved in several legal claims against individuals who had committed crimes against children, [producing] evidence to demonstrate that this was the person who perpetrated that particular crime. Also, she was involved in returning bodies to families after [wars], for example in Bosnia, and this was through human identification. That’s one aspect of speciality in anatomy.

My speciality is clinical anatomy, and in clinical anatomy, it’s really all about where. Where is the phrenic nerve? Where is the superior mesenteric artery? Not just about where but, basically, what is its path? What structures lie close to it? In the case of the superior mesenteric artery, it begins at the distal part of the first lumbar vertebra. Then people are interested in specifics, so they want to know that it is one centimeter lateral of the celiac trunk or something to that effect, and that’s because part of our job is to inform surgeons – e.g., where the nerves are, and also in what percentage of the population would you find them perhaps one centimeter lateral or one centimeter medial and so on. It’s to do with that type of specificity. Anatomists really feed on technicalities and on detail.

BT: [So] clinical anatomy is about where and it’s about knowing the names of structures that have been passed down through the ages. Really you’re very much steeped initially in what I’m now calling, and many people are now calling, the old paradigm – this idea of parts, naming parts. [And] you are such a champion for the new paradigm as well. You’re running the world’s first biotensegrity dissections. You’ve been writing articles with really compelling titles like “Fascia and the Fallacy of Biomechanics.” These are big things. I’m curious, do you agree first of all with these terms – old paradigm, new paradigm – and if so, how might you differentiate them?

JS: Yes, I absolutely do, and I also realize that I’m not alone. There are many individuals on this path, and that’s really what took me into the path of Dr. Stephen Levin, [who] was investigating this biotensegrity model. When you’re investigating and somebody else is investigating, it takes you perhaps to a common ground. Over twenty, twentyfive years ago, Dr. Levin [and I] met. We started to communicate and we began to exchange thoughts and ideas; and of course Stephen has a number of years in life on me, and so he was well ahead of the curve. [Editor’s note: Brooke Thomas’ interview with Stephen Levin appears on page 6.]

Even if I’d never met Stephen and if I’d never come across this term biotensegrity, my own experiences were leading me [in that direction]. In clinical anatomy what typically happens is that [new students] are given a textbook, this could be Gray’s Dissector, and they open it up and it will immediately begin to tell them how to carry out the dissection. Every student follows the guidelines in whatever textbook of choice the university uses, I’m just using Gray’s Dissector as an example. They follow the dissection descriptions and carry out those dissections the same way that the previous students a year earlier carried out the dissection. The same way students a year earlier carried out the dissection, and in fact the same way students from perhaps the last several hundred years have carried out these dissections. From that viewpoint, the dissection has always been the same. What tends to happen is that in anatomy they want to get through the skin, through the subcutaneous, and get down to the structures that ‘really matter’ the most – the nerves and the blood vessels and perhaps then the viscera and the musculature.

That really is a focus of parts and the language of parts, while I was really interested in exploring the language of wholes. I wanted to appreciate the relationships and the continuity. In many ways you are not even given the opportunity to do that, because as a student, you’re usually at a table with five other students. You can’t really dictate to them and say, “Oh, hang on guys. Let’s not destroy this until I get to have a look at it.” In the department of anatomy, my nickname was Fascia Man because I had an interest in fascia, and in fact one of my colleagues who works with me on the biotensegrity-focused dissections (he went on to do his PhD and so he is now a doctor of anatomy) still calls me Fascia Man because he remembers the nickname. Every time I’m in the dissection room, they introduce me as Fascia Man. It’s lived with me because it was so unusual for them – “Oh, you’re the guy who talks about continuity. You’re the guy who talks about fascia.”

That’s what really intrigued me, and that’s what led me to meet with Dr. Stephen Levin. I’m so lucky, Brooke, and this is a big reflection of Dr. Levin’s spirit and of the kind of man he is. We established what’s called the BIG group; the Biotensegrity Interest Group. We meet every year and there is no fee for these meetings; it’s just a group of interested persons arriving and sharing their information. People like Robert Schleip and others have been at these meetings. That’s just amazing that you get to meet and speak with some of these people and you don’t actually have to pay for it. That’s really informed me over the years.

BT: Could you define biotensegrity in the way that you think of it.

JS: Sure. I’m sure that many of your listeners will understand what tensegrity means; ‘tensegrity’ of course is basically a compression of the words tension and integrity. This word was brought to us by the engineer Buckminster Fuller, and so this really relates to some of matter – the construction of buildings, of bridges – which requires nuts and bolts and screws, etc. This is also the language that’s used in biomechanics. However, biotensegrity refers to living tissue.

People often use a particular toy from The Manhattan Toy Company called Skwish™ to explain the principles of tensegrity. What you have basically are wooden struts with an elasticated band that runs throughout the structure. The wooden struts don’t touch each other, they’re kept apart by the tensional aspect from the bands. While this can be used as a visual aid to discuss tensegrity, it’s also an enemy to me because the very materials that this little toy is made of are the wrong materials. We are not made of wooden struts and we do not have elasticated bands. For me, Brooke, words are hugely important and I fully understand that there will be people who say, “John Sharkey is just making a big thing out of nothing.”

Human tissue is not supposed to be stretched – and take this with a pinch of salt because I’ll have to put it into context, but human tissue does not stretch. We can see that for instance in skin. If somebody has been heavier and then lost weight, we see stretch marks [on the skin] because the integrity of that structure has been compromised. Now it’s not that I’m saying to people, “Don’t do what you have been doing all along.” What I’m saying basically is that, “What you think you have been doing and what you are actually doing are possibly two different things.” I would like to see a discussion regarding the vocabulary, and perhaps changing this word ‘stretch’. In a discussion I was having with a colleague, he was talking about stretchy material in the pelvis. That’s where the whole problem is, once the tissues in the pelvis have stretched, they will not return to their former states.

This is one of the things that is so important in terms of bodywork and movement therapy, because there are many people who spend hours stretching. Gymnasts are known to lie on their backs, place their bottoms against a wall, let their legs abduct, and then take either a magazine or a book and lie there and read for half an hour or an hour. The question you’ve got to ask yourself is, how are they achieving this range of motion, this new additional range of motion? Now I don’t like the terms ‘origins’ and ‘insertions’ in terms of biotensegrity, but I think that’s a language of convenience that we can use. It’s not that we want to take the origin and insertion any further away. We’re trying to change those tissues that lie between the origins and insertions, perhaps maybe the more contractile tissues, the fibers, or perhaps those tissues that can become a little bit buggy and sticky and cause ‘adhesion’ (this is another word I don’t like).

Dr. Jean-Claude Guimberteau will be joining me this summer at the pre-conference day for the British Fascia Symposium. In Guimberteau’s videos, he uses the word ‘sliding’. Place one hand on top of the other and then move your hand back and forward, and you feel heat, a consequence of the friction: this would not be a good way for mother nature to build living structure. In living architecture, tissues do not slide. What they do in fact is glide relative to each other, and Guimberteau’s videos demonstrate that beautifully. If you look at his Strolling Under the Skin, it’s a perfect example of gliding as opposed to sliding.

When we talk about living tissue versus non-biological tissue, it’s important to make that distinction because people talk about stretching in a Newtonian way. If we were to take a look at various structures (again with my clinical anatomy hat on) in a Newtonian tube – for instance, the heart or the blood vessels – the tube would lengthen and it would expand under pressure. With all that pressure, the blood vessels in the brain should also expand and squeeze the brain out through the eye sockets and the ears. This doesn’t happen because of what’s known as nonlinearity of the arterial walls. To me it’s an important discussion, and to me language is hugely important. I’d love to see the bodywork and movement therapy worlds change the word ‘stretching’, or at least realize that that is not what you’re trying to do. If anything, you’re trying to restore physiological range of motion if [it] has been lost, but we certainly do not want to take somebody’s physiological range and increase it because most likely you’d get into damaging ligaments and lengthening ligaments, and that’s going to lead to a lack of stability. Lack of stability will mean that the body has to try to find stiffness and tension from somewhere in order to be able to support a joint, and that’s going to come from the more contractile tissues. The muscles are experts at contracting, but also we have various fascia in the human body and they also contract, just not quite in the same way as muscle fiber. By the way, muscle fibers are fascia.

BT: I know. It’s so important.

JS: Yes, and they’re not to be separated from the continuity that exists. They are specialists along a continuum, and fascia can also contract. The issue and the problem with contraction in fascia is that it could start contracting today and may not stop contracting for the next two to three years.

BT: I think that language is wildly important, particularly when our models of how we understand the human body are evolving; so language has to evolve alongside that too or we get stuck.

JS: Let’s applaud that because I tend to find that people don’t place enough importance on that. I believe that the image you have in your head when you come to a table to do some bodywork, and you’re about to make a decision on behalf of a client, I believe that the words create images in your head, and those images inform you as to what it is you wish to achieve and how you’re achieving it. If you have a false image in your mind, I think that you’re going to have false expectations in terms of the therapeutic outcomes.

BT: Agreed, and I think that happens with dissections as well. If people start out with a drawing of a shiny red muscle against a white background as a separate piece, and then are handed a scalpel and told, “Make it look like this,” they’re really not paying attention to what’s in front of them, they’re just trying to make it look like the concept they’re starting with.

JS: Exactly, and what we’re getting there is a very antiseptic view of the human body. By the way, I don’t ever want to throw the baby out with the bath water. I love the history of anatomy. The history of anatomy is quite dark because from the very earliest dissections via Alexandria (or back to the ancient Egyptians) and coming into the more modern era, the church was keeping a very close eye on scientists and anatomists. Leonardo da Vinci had to do his dissections in secret. So from that viewpoint, there is a dark history, but it’s also a really interesting history. For instance, the term ‘acetabulum’, any idea what that might mean?

BT: No, I don’t know. I hadn’t thought of that one.

JS: [With] one half of the pelvis turned on its side, [it] resembled a vinegar bowl, and so the Greeks gave it the name acetabulum – this would be the little bowl of vinegar they would dip their breads into. The terms used in anatomy for muscles are very ordinary, simple words that really inform us what the structure does, or where it is: tibialis anterior basically tells you where it is, flexor digitorum longus tells you at least that it flexes. That’s in traditional anatomy by the way.

However, we are dealing with threedimensionality. The tensegrity icosahedron (a polyhedron with twenty faces), which is what biotensegrity is based upon, is really multidimensional. It’s definitely fourth-dimensional and it may be multidimensional, but we will never get to see that because the tensegrity icosahedron is a three-dimensional vision on earth of something that is fourthdimensional. We don’t have the capacity to be able to see it. We may be able to provide some examples using computers. This structure is what we use to show how cellular activity might conduct itself. The problem is that it’s presented on earth in a three-dimensional manner.

In fact, again with my anatomist hat on, you have a right eye and you have a left eye and they are set apart on your face. The information that you take in will cause the brain some problems because the brain basically would say, “The image I’m getting from this side and the image I’m getting from that side are not correct. There seems to be a disparity here.” So what the brain does is it tries to fill in the missing information. We actually see in 2D, but at best we see in what’s known as pseudo 3D or 2.5D, because your brain is filling in the rest of the information. You have two images, the brain is giving you what we call depth. Think about that, that we can only see in 2.5D, but the tensegrity icosahedron operates in at least the fourth dimension if not the fifth dimension. By the way, for those people who think that the fourth dimension is time, you always have to have time because something can’t exist unless you have time, so time exists in all of the dimensions. I’m not talking about time, I’m more or less talking about something like a Möbius strip, so that there’s no inside and no outside and there is just continuity – and that is true of the human living architecture.

BT: I had never thought about that before, that we literally can’t comprehend continuity because we can’t really see it.

JS: This is why what I really want to try to do with the scientific community, with the bodywork community, is to ask people to consider the model of biotensegrity and recognize that what we are actually dealing with requires soft-matter physics. Softmatter physics will give us the mathematica models, to provide us then with computer graphics that will help us to explain these multidimensional dynamics.

For instance, there are colleagues of ours who are working with NASA and helping to build robots that can go to far-off places in space such as Mars, etc. They’re using tensegrity principles but also biotensegrity principles. It is amazing to me that we are still working off the idea that the body is a lever-based system. For that to be the case, we would have to have screws going through the joints. If we took the knee joint, for instance, your femur and your tibia would have to overlap and there would have to be a pin joint in place. There would have to actually be a screw. To me that’s one of the basic and easiest visuals. You take a look at an x-ray and you see that there’s space between those bones. How can there be space when you’re standing? Why are the bones not crushing each other? Why are they not compromising that space? People have this notion that there must be a lot of fluid inside the knee joint because it is a fluid-filled joint. Lick your hand. That is pretty much how much fluid you have in your knee joint. What is it that’s saving and keeping the integrity of that joint space in place?

That really is where the discussion needs to go. It needs to go into a new anatomy, it’s the twenty-first century, not the old biomechanics. They’ve tried to explain how people in a gym can lift 200 kilograms, saying things like, “It’s intra-abdominal pressure.” Then you have someone like Serge Gracovetsky who provides evidence that to lift a weight any heavier than fifty kilograms would require so much intraabdominal pressure that a person would explode. We know that we can’t explain how some of these long-distance migrating birds can travel 9,000 miles without cooking themselves. In other words, the amount of heat that they would generate from the muscular action of flapping their wings would cook them. Or perhaps the example that a kangaroo jumps simply because he stores energy in his tendon. Nobody is discussing the role of bone: bone is soft matter, it is not hard matter, all it is is a continuation of the fascia. [Bone] happens to be harder than ligament; ligaments tend to be tougher and a little bit harder than tendons; tendons tend to be tougher and harder than the septal tissue that acts as a partitioner; and so on up to subcutaneous tissue, which is a much softer, malleable, pliable tissue. What you have is continuity, and speciality on the continuity.

BT: You recently took on a project that involved probably quite a lot of building bridges between this old paradigm and new paradigm: you co-authored the third edition of The Concise Book of Muscles. How do you approach a task like that? It’s right there in the title, ‘muscles’, and you’re a fascia man. What was your approach?

JS: Well, I have a number of titles, I write specifically for Lotus Publishing, and my publisher asked if I would take on this project. Now the problem of course is that the book is very much based upon origininsertion, and would be very much be based upon ‘this muscle produces this action’, but my responsibility is to create change. Now that I’m in my mid-fifties, the one thing that I realize, Brooke, is that change takes time. You won’t achieve a lot of change, it might be huge within a particular context, and from that viewpoint I said, “I’m going to take on this task.” I made a lot of changes to the textbook. Because it is such a popular book, many medical students use [it], so I was very aware of the responsibility that I was taking on. From that viewpoint, I was able to change quite a bit of the anatomy. It’s amazing how many people think that there are only twelve cranial nerves in the human body. There are at least thirteen, and there is possibly a fourteenth. We need more research to know whether the seventh cranial nerve just simply subdivides and branches off, or if the branch is in fact a true cranial nerve on its own. The point is that this type of detail is incredibly important for undergraduate and med students and I wanted to make sure that they had the accurate information within the book. Then the other aspect was, I introduced a section that was co-authored by myself and Dr. Levin to introduce the idea of biotensegrity as the new anatomy for the twenty-first century. I suppose it’s a soft introduction, and then perhaps in the next edition, I make some additional changes. Let’s say in the next ten to fifteen years, if I’m still alive, the sixth and seventh editions will look very different to the current edition.

BT: Let’s talk a little bit about the biotensegrity dissections that you’re running at Dundee University in Scotland. The first was last summer, and the second is going to be at the end of June, beginning of July this summer [2016]. The first thing I’d like to address, and then we can talk about what happens there more broadly, is the cadavers are treated with something called Thiel rather than formaldehyde. Why are you doing that and what is that?

JS: Over the years I realized that working with cadaveric specimens that are treated with formalin and formaldehyde changes the texture, changes the color, everything looks like a fawn color. In fact, you could have a student call me over to a table and say, “John, what’s this structure?” I might say, “Gosh, I don’t know.” You really would not know what the structure was because it looks like all the other little structures that are there. What you would have to do is follow that structure along its course and bring it back to its origin in order to be able to say, “That’s actually such and such a nerve” based upon where it has originated from and the path that it has taken. From a textural viewpoint as well, all the tissues change color.

Here’s a point I try to make: once you make an incision to skin, and you allow atmospheric air to touch what is beneath the skin, you will begin to see changes taking place. From that viewpoint, if somebody takes a piece of tissue out of the human body, and they carry out some type of investigation on that tissue, what you’re actually witnessing are emergent properties. We go back again to the amazing historical pioneering work of Dr. Guimberteau because Jean-Claude could do what no university would allow a PhD student to do. That is, he was able to get permission from his patients to place a camera under their skin. For the first time in history, we have recorded images of our connective tissue in living tissue, and it just has blown people away. It certainly blew me away. This is the type of visual evidence that I needed to be able to demonstrate (which helps me to be able to support why I say that you cannot stretch or should not be stretching tissues) that tissues glide relative to each other but they do not slide relative to each other. In fact, in Dundee in the summer, we are going to be bringing in an endoscope and we’re going to be actually using the endoscope on the Thiel cadavers.

With the Thiel soft-fix technique, the cadavers hold on to their original colors, I’m able to keep fluids moving in the arterial and veinal system, and I’m able to keep the lungs inflating and deflating. It’s a very real experience, as close to the surgeons as you possibly can get, [although] of course there is no life in the tissue. Bear in mind that when we use a tensegrity model again there is no breath in the model, there’s no nervous system in the model, and they’re made of the wrong materials, so this is a really great opportunity for me to be able to tell people these are models that help us to put forward some type of image and to be able to talk about continuity. For instance, we might talk about the wooden struts being discontinuous and the elasticated tissues being continuous, but in a biotensegrity, that’s just not the case. In biotensegrity, the bones are simply a continuation of the fascia, so there is no discontinuous element. That is a really important piece to get across.

BT: It’s hugely important. I went to art school, so I’m imagining how amazing it would be if somebody could make a toy that was woven, where you could actually see the continuity of the form instead of wood and then elastic bands, but anyway that’s my aside. That’s my personal fantasy.

JS: Let’s just repeat that really quick because I think that that is such an important point. [Compared to a tensegrity model], in the human body there is no beginning, there is no end, there is no front, no back. There is an inside and an outside in terms of atmospheric air, but when we get down to the micro and nuclear level, we’re dealing with a different dimensional space. In fact, if somebody was to hold their thumb and first finger apart, and let’s say they took the fingers apart by an inch, that inch is infinite. We can say it’s an inch, but it in fact is infinite – and that’s science.

BT: Aliveness changes so much, which is why Guimberteau’s films are a huge leap forward in our understanding of the living human form. I’m curious, when you ran the dissection last summer, were there any surprises or any big aha moments for you in doing a biotensegrity-focused dissection with that Thiel-treated tissue?

JS: First of all, there are always aha moments. When you pick up any anatomy textbook, [it will say a] muscle comes from here to here. The truth of the matter is that the norm in human anatomy is individuality. The norm is not that we are all the same; the norm is that we are all different. Every single dissection on every single donor brings forth just amazing differences. There were several that we found. Wilbour Kelsick, a chiropractor based in Canada, called me over to the table because they were looking at the biceps femoris and its attachment. Basically it became the gastrocnemius; there was no real direct attachment down onto the bone. It just went under a slip of connective tissue and one muscle became the other. In the textbooks you see a tendon going to a portion of the bone and attaching to it. The early anatomists got some things right, they could see that the talar was a sesamoid bone, a bone that was floating in connective tissue. In the biotensegrity model, what we can demonstrate in the dissection is that every bone is floating in the connective tissue, so every bone in the human body is a sesamoid bone.

Because of our particular approach to the dissection, we will perhaps take the skin off as one autonomous structure. We would take the subcutaneous fat as one autonomous structure so that it at least gives people the impression of continuity, of connectiveness, and that’s what the dissection also brings to people. It brings them a very strong visual image that shows the continuity, and that there is no such thing as a biceps brachii or a rectus capitis posterior minor. These are man-made terms because some person back in probably the thirteenth century put names on muscles, and they decided to make an incision on the tendinous inscription at either end and then take that up and call it a name. You ended up with your vastus medialis or your vastus lateralis. For those individuals who come to my Facebook page, I put a post up just a couple of weeks back highlighting the fact that we’ve discovered a new muscle in quadriceps. I’m not sure what we’re going to call the ‘quadriceps’ anymore.

BT: Wow, interesting. This focus on individuality releases us from so much of the dogma that gets passed around, not just in anatomy but also in movement. That everyone has this attaching here to here and it does this action, so everyone should be able to accomplish x, y, z.

JS: Absolutely, there’s no doubt about that. It doesn’t necessarily mean that somebody is going to be restricted. They may need some adaptation. What’s really interesting is I’ll often have students take out a whole range of femurs and pelvises and give them some cloth measuring tapes. They will measure the diaphysis and the epiphysis, they will measure the neck, they’ll measure the head, they can measure the depth of the acetabulum, the hip joint . . . and when they come back they will find that none of the measurements are similar in any of the bones that they were given. For me at least, it translates into the fact that there is no one squat that suits all or fits all. You really have to work with people as individuals, and when you can see that in the anatomy department, it really drives that point home that we shouldn’t be expecting that everybody can do the same thing the same way.

BT: Wonderful. With this shift that we’re making, this evolving into a new paradigm of understanding the body, what is it leading us towards? What are some changes in approach or intervention that might be born of understanding a more biotensegrity model of the body?

JS: First of all in terms of anatomy, we tend to look at the connective tissues from both an embryology viewpoint and from a phylogeny viewpoint. In other words, if we take a look at the human body, there’s nothing perfect about our anatomy or our neurology. If I were to make the human eyeball, I think I would make it differently to what we currently have. If we were to take a look at the path of certain nerves, particularly cranial nerves, you might be forgiven to think that cranial nerves would come out of the skull close to where their terminal destiny is, and that’s just not true. These nerves take torturous routes, circuitous routes, to get to where they need to go, and you think, “Hang on a second, what does that mean?”

What that means, basically, is that as these nerves are going from the brain to their terminal structures, they will have many branches off the mother nerve. Remember these all have continuity with the connective tissue. In surgeries it is referred to as the ‘passenger’. It could be for instance, the uterus or it could be some other structure that we’re looking at, the nerve structure. They are simply the passengers that are being supported by the connective tissue. If your focus is on doing something with just the passenger and you think you can just stitch the passenger against something that’ll hold it in place, that is completely wrong. Believe it or not, that is what is happening in many surgeries at the moment, where a surgeon will take up lax tissue and stitch it perhaps to a particular ligament. In nature, that tissue was never attached to that particular ligament, but they think that they’re offering integrity where in fact what they need to do is to go in and recognize where the true insults in the soft tissue are and repair only those soft-tissue insults. It really means that we need to be more respectful to the wrapping, to the tissue that roams through and around and over and above. This changes the way in which orthopedic surgeons will approach surgery.

From a movement and bodywork viewpoint, biotensegrity is an amazing model for demonstrating to individuals that if you have a pain and problem in your shoulder, I would say that a good 85% of the time if not 90% of the time, your problem is not your shoulder. Your shoulder is making a noise, it’s screaming and shouting for attention, but it is going to be a problem that is perhaps lower down the kinetic chain. I don’t want to jump into conclusions, but bear in mind that the real motors for movement up in the shoulder come from the lower limbs. Your shoulder musculature is really about dexterity, it’s really about fine tuning and doing rotations, twists. People like to train their upper limb, show off their bis and tris. I wish they could really understand the consequences, because if you think of it in terms of kinetic chains and links, [they develop] this big massive link that has no relationship to the entire chain, and now it’s capable of perhaps producing forces that are out of sync with the entire structure, and what are the consequences of that?

Our shape, our strengths, would have been dictated by the fact we would have had to climb a tree, or climb the face of a cliff in order to get to an apple tree, or we wanted to go down on the beach and climb over the rocks. We have to have that type of dexterity. We didn’t have a fitness center with a leg-extension machine that we could go into and place weights on the weight stack and then sit into this machine, really disassociating the upper body with the lower body, and then focusing our attention and isolating the quadriceps, and then asking the quadriceps against resistance to repeatedly contract. What this is basically doing is teaching the body new neuromuscular engrams. It’s teaching the musculature, this is how you contract, this is how you operate, and it’s just losing the connection between the entire body – which would be full-chain kinetic exercise.

BT: You’re painting a really remarkable picture of just how much can change as we understand continuity better, really big differences in how we would approach surgery, movement, manual therapy, and just how we would live in our bodies generally.

JS: I love sport and I want to play in sport. If people love the gym and want to lift incredibly heavy weights and do leg extensions, I don’t mind as long as they’ve been informed [and] understand what the ramifications are. What I am concerned about is children, and children involved in sporting activities and in very strenuous activities. That will have longterm ramifications as they become adults. For people who think that it is a great idea to be able to raise your leg, your lower limb, in a fashion that mimics kicking an imperial guard who’s on an imaginary horse in some paddy field in China, if that’s what you wish to do because you’re involved in the martial arts and you love that, then knock yourself out. Just bear in mind that having that type of range of motion could bring with it some issues later in your life. So we need to make sure that we’re giving people the right information.

BT: I am so grateful for all the work that you’re doing, really shining light on this new paradigm and being able to build the bridge. Thank you so much, John.

Brooke Thomas is a Certified Rolfer who has been practicing for over fifteen years. A selfadmitted body nerd, she teaches movement and hosts The Liberated Body Podcast as a continuing-education resource for those in the manual and movement therapy fields. Visit www.liberatedbody.com for more episodes, or visit www.newhavenrolfing.com for more information about Brooke and her practice.

John Sharkey is a clinical anatomist, exercise physiologist, and European Neuromuscular Therapist. He has developed the world’s only master’s degree in neuromuscular therapy, which is accredited by the University of Chester (UK). He is on the editorial board for the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, The International Journal of Osteopathy, and The International Journal of Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork. He is also a member of the Olympic Council’s medical team and a founding member of the BIG, otherwise known as the Biotensegrity Interest Group. He has authored several books including the third edition of The Concise Book of Muscles.