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 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 flexors 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 flex 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 a sock puppet and you are making it nod yes. (The chin to chest part of the yes, specifically).
These muscles work together to make this possible. And although they may be asked from different neural pathways to fire separately and move individually, there can come a time when they are so entangled with each other that their ability to free themselves is limited, if not gone altogether. Looking at dysfunctions such as trigger finger or Dupuytren’s contracture, we realize the more engrossed a coalition of muscles is in one task, the more likely it is to get stuck. Of course, it’s not exactly that translatable, but you get the idea. A healthy individual involves a steady balance between doing things with others and carving out alone time.
Giving Muscles Back Their Identity
When it comes to bodywork approaches toward muscles that can’t quite separate themselves from their party, try focusing on the fascial boundaries that help offer each muscle a sense of identity. With your client prone on the table, situate their arm next to their body so that their palm faces up toward the ceiling. Begin with a nice steamroll, using your forearm or a soft fist, to open up the enmeshed flexors of your client’s forearm. Start at the elbow and slide all the way down to the wrist, lightening up on your pressure over the carpal tunnel, and then sinking back into the palm all the way through the fingers. This sets the stage.
Then you can dive in. If you don’t know your forearm muscle anatomy to the letter, that’s OK! With specific thumbs, fingers, or knuckles—given your preference and good body mechanic tactics—slide down each of the sections of the medial forearm that correlate to each finger on the hand. Having your client wiggle their fingers while you do this gives you a strong sense of where the muscle is located. Fall to either side of that and begin to create a divide. The forearm flexors may be a little unhappy at first, like two kids pulled out of a fight and placed in different corners of the room, but offering them a little space also offers them time to think. And this gives them back their identity.
Asking your clients to engage in the work you are doing doesn’t only give you a sense of where things lie—it also helps the client understand their own anatomy. If we allow the muscles in our bodies to get lost among all the other soft tissues that surround them, the ability to articulate dissolves. Look at it this way: Belonging to a group is an active practice, not a passive state of existence. Healing the muscles that are adhered and limited involves the same focused awareness that would be helpful for the many aspects of how we, as humans, can get lost in the shuffle.
 Allison Denney is a certified massage therapist and certified YouTuber. You can find her massage tutorials at YouTube.com/RebelMassage. She is also passionate about creating products that are kind, simple, and productive for therapists to use in their practices. Her products, along with access to her blog and CE opportunities, can be found at rebelmassage.com.