Wetsuit

Have you ever worn a wetsuit or tried to take off wet clothes? It can feel restricting. Sometimes limited range of motion comes from multiple layers of tissue getting stuck together. In some cases it can be at the skin level through multiple layers of muscle and fascia down to the bone.

An athlete who was having a lot of hip pain and hip flexor tightness came to see me a few years ago. He was having trouble dropping in the hole on his olympic lifts and no amount of hip and thigh stretching and mobilizing had cleared it up. I assessed down to his shins where I noticed the skin didn’t glide freely over his tibia bones on both legs. This was limiting knee flexion and both plantar and dorsiflexion at the ankle. We focused a couple sessions on freeing the skin and superficial layers over his feet and lower legs and integrated it up to his hips.

Right away be was able to drop into a squat with ease. He attributed his bound shins to playing a lot of soccer throughout his life without wearing shin guards. He thinks years of kicks to the shins and ankle injuries caused the skin to get tacked down to the tissues and bone below.

Back to the wetsuit. Imagine wearing a tight wetsuit. Your deep muscles can be free and a mobile as ever, but the wetsuit will still limit your mobility or increase the effort it takes to move. The skin can be like a wetsuit. We want it to be mobile and somewhat separate from the surfaces below it.

Tattoos can also be limiting. Sometimes the needle literally stitches skin to layers below it causing a restricted range of motion in an adjacent area. For example, a tattoo along the lat muscle can limit overhead range of motion. It’s not permanent and can be easily freed up with some skin rolling or Instrument Assisted Soft Tissue Manipulation (IASTM).

The main take away is, like in the previous post, don’t overlook the superficial layers. Many people want to go straight for the deep tissue when it’s the surface tissue that can create limitation too.