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L i s te n to T h e A B M P Po d c a s t a t a b m p.co m /p o d c a s t s o r w h e reve r yo u a cce s s yo u r favo r i te p o d c a s t s 25 TECHNIQUE By Allison Denney KEY POINTS • Muscles can become too entangled in their muscle groups and begin to lose their identities. • Focusing on the fascia that surrounds and separates muscles can help alleviate the tension that arises from adhesions and restore a sense of identity. We humans like to group ourselves together, don't we? Many of us like to put things into categories and organize anything and everything. But we also like to group our actual selves. We like our teams, our friends, our clubs, our political affiliations, our style choices, and our sides in a movie love triangle. We buy the shirts, create the hashtags, and rest well at night knowing we are a part of something. As humans, we like the familiarity of belonging to a like-minded group. We are, after all, social beings. Some of us may spend a lifetime trying to find our groups. Others are born into them and never leave. This latter category is how I like to think about our muscles. They are stuck in place and don't get the luxury of traveling around, exploring different bony landmarks, and trying out various movements. They are born into their crew and will never leave the bones they are attached to or the muscle groups they belong to. In either scenario, whether you stay at home or travel the world, becoming too immersed in your group can have a negative effect. The upside is that the safety that comes with these communities allows us Getting a Grip on Letting Go THE REBEL MT the freedom to be individuals. But the downfall is that if you become too absorbed, you can lose your identity and begin to betray yourself and your people. With muscles, perhaps because they don't get the freedom to roam and discover themselves, they can become consumed by the group. Pulling their weight, so to speak, becomes problematic, and defining their boundaries becomes essential. Let's take, for example, the f lexors of the forearm, wrist, and hand. Here is a group of muscles that works together as a team on the medial side of the forearm. As a whole, without getting too specific, they originate on and around the medial epicondyle of the humerus and insert onto various aspects of the medial wrist and the palmar landmarks of the hand. Their job as a group, with some variations when looking at them individually, is to f lex the wrist and the fingers, or to bring the hand into a fist position and then bring that fist toward the inside of the forearm—as if your hand was