Taking Out the Slack

What it Means and Why it is of Central Importance.

A student of mine just wrote me the following:

“When we were going over “taking the slack out”, can you quickly explain to me the goal of doing this and anatomically what exactly is the slack we’re taking out?”

“From my understanding of muscle slack, slack occurs when muscles and tendons are not activated and therefore at rest. If we’re taking the slack out, is the goal to get the muscles back to a better length-tension relationship?”

“Also, if the muscles are over active and very tense, are we still taking the slack out in them? 

"If you wouldn’t mind briefly explaining this I would greatly appreciate it. Just want to make sure I’m super clear myself so I can properly explain this to clients.”

This is an excellent question, one I frequently hear from students, and It is something all practitioners should be clear about.

"First take out the slack before initiating the movements" is something I heard Milton say over and over through my years with him.  Here is why.

He was referring primarily to the slippage in the skin as we try to move the deeper tissues.  If this slippage is not prevented by taking out the skin slack, much of the movement will be lost in merely sliding the skin layer back and forth on the surface below it.  So the initial preparatory movement when setting any body part into motion is to gather this skin slack up with a moderate pressure and a tautening of the skin layer in the direction of the movement you are preparing to stimulate.

“I had had so much of his body--both in depth and extensiveness--set into motion and creating sensations from his own tissues that there was no sensory room left over to focus on what my hands were doing.  He became so engaged with the experience of himself that I was all but irrelevant.”

Again, if you do not take out this skin slack, much of your  motions will be simply swishing the skin layer back and forth.  And this traction on the skin slack goes much deeper than the skin itself.  Under the squamous layer, the skin's surface is connected to the loose structure of the connective tissue that binds it to the underlying fascial sheath that encloses the body as a whole.  In turn, this fascial sheath is connected by connective tissue webbing that extends into the deeper tissues--muscle bellies, blood/lymph/neural tubing embedded within the CT matrix, all deeper facial planes, all organ compartments and individual cell compartments, and ultimately to the periosteal continuum surrounding the entire skeleton.

As we take out the skin slack, the loose layer of CT underneath it is stretched, engaging the denser fascia of the encompassing body sheath below it.  As the CT body-sheath is in turn stretched, its connecting matrix stretches the CT surrounding the deeper muscle tissue as well.  And this stretching then extends to fascia surrounding blood vessels, lymph vessels, nerve trunks and axons, and, as I said, ultimately to the skeleton deep beneath the skin.

As we then more directly engage the muscle cells in their compartments, each rhythmic, rocking movement is aimed at coaxing the tone and length settings of muscle fibers, non-intrusively asking these fibers to give up some tonal tension and length bit by bit; "give me another millimeter on this rock, and another millimeter with the next one, and so on," is how like to phrase it in demonstrations and to my clients on the table.

If the skin slack is not taken out, and if this skin stretch is not steadily maintained as we are working, then much of our movements are engaged in skin slippage and not on the deeper tissues below it.  So the bottom line is that tautening the skin pulls taut all the webbing of the CT matrix deep to it.

(I find in rather conceptually misleading to talk about "layers" of fascia; the matrix is a three-dimensional spider web, with all components woven into one another, down to the individual compartments of single cells, and indeed into their very cytoskeletons within them.  How then do we talk about, and accurately conceptualize, "layers" in a continuous and ubiquitous CT spider-web-like matrix?  Not very well, I suggest.  In the matrix is an array of thickenings and thinnings that define more or less the looseness or denseness of various CT components--dense, for instance in the fascia lata of the outer thigh or the plantar fascia of the foot, and looser in the webbing that connects all the tubes of blood, lymph and nerve sheaths to all the tissues around them.  It makes no conceptual sense to label different parts of this continuum as separate "layers" like a cake, since everything is woven into everything else on all levels.  It is not a stacking of layers, but rather a single integrated whole.)

This point of view is a real paradigm shift in how we think of the body's essential physical unity at all levels.  For my thoughts here I am deeply indebted to the work of Jean-Claude Guimerteau's revolutionary research of CT properties.  I highly recommend two of his masterful videos--"Strolling Under the Skin" and "Muscle Attitudes."  Here you will find images and commentary about CT that are not, to my knowledge, available anywhere else.  They are many times over worth the investment.  They can be found on Amazon or Jean-Claude's website.  Be sure you get a version that includes English over-dubbing of the original French.

So let me give you a couple of examples of my own experience of these ideas in practical applications:

1) Engaging the lattisimus dorsai in order to lengthen its fibers so the arm can fully extend overhead.

Client face down, I softly place my hands on the skin covering the lattisimus. With a little added pressure I stretch the skin toward the shoulder blade and socket.  I feel the first fibers of CT just beneath the skin tautening. A little more pressure and stretch engages the thicker fascia of the body sheath. And this in turn engages the lattisimus muscle sheath, which transfers a gentle pull on the muscle's fibers within it.  Maintaining the "slack out" stretch, I nudge the muscle fibers more and more toward the shoulder, lengthening them bit-by-bit, rock by rock.

As the lattisumus muscle fibers are coaxed to lengthen, and the stretch begins to extend in turn to other CT muscle sheaths and the muscle fibers within them, and finally down to the bones, I feel my rhythmic nudges engage the rib cage; then the spine; then through the spine to the pelvis.  From my single hands position then, I am able to engage the skin slack, the body sheath, the various local muscle compartments in the area of the lattisimus, the rib cage, the spine and finally the sacrum/pelvis where the lattisimus is anchored south of my hands.

As I continue my nudges north toward the shoulder, I feel all of these soft tissue components lengthening and the bones moving; when all the various slacks are out all the way to the pelvis, I can feel its weight through my hands like feeling the tug of a yo-yo at the end of its string as I rhythmically nudge everything north, using both my nudges north and the counterweight of the pelvis tugging the opposite direction to lengthen the lattisimus and everything else in between.  

It is a constant mental/physical/feeling focus on my part, moment by moment ("be here now...and now...and now") that lets me track all of these elements participating together to bring them all into the movement and extension of the lattisimus and the arm, just as they all would in an unrestricted reach of the arm overhead.  Many things happening at once, and many of them occurring not where my hands are physically.  Only by continually engaging the "slack out" stretch of all these tissues as things progress do I effect these deeper and more extensive lengthenings of them.

Often during a demo I will rock without taking out the superficial slack, swishing the skin back and forth as I do so.  Then I will take out the slack and repeat the movements.  The student on the table will always say, "When you take out the slack I feel the movements much deeper and more extensively."  Exactly.

And clients in my studio often respond by saying, "Wow, I can feel my bones move all the way down to my pelvis (perhaps even down the the foot).  Voila!  We have reached deep core structure from a single surface hands position.

2) Rocking the leg

Client face up. I softly place my hands on the skin of the thigh/quadriceps area.  I begin by stretching the skin rolling inward in toward the midline between the client's legs.  As the skin grows taut, I feel an engagement of the body sheath and muscle bellies deep to it.  As I continually maintain (and increase) this stretch while I am rocking, I feel the quads rolling back and forth around the shaft of the femur.  Then I feel the femur itself  beginning to roll back and forth.  As the bone of the femur becomes engaged, I can see the rolling of the lower leg begin as well.  As I continue to accumulate the stretch down to the bones and toward the foot, I can see and feel the foot wagging back and forth at the ankle, and eventually the toes wagging back and forth at the end of their metatarsals.

As with the pelvis through the lattisimus fibers in example 1, I can use this weight of the foot as a rhythmical counterweight to the movements of my hands on the thigh--leg rolls in, foot wags out, leg rolls back out, foot wags in, and toes begin to flop as well.

So, as things progress, I have felt the slack come out of the superficial skin surface, felt the CT web engage the body sheath, then the muscle bellies of the quad, felt the quad engage the movement of the femur, and felt the movement of the femur travel all the way through the lower leg to the foot and toes. Be here now...and now...and now...

And again, voila!  From a single hands position I have penetrated the movement and the lengthening stretches of the entire leg and foot.  And at the upper end of the femur I have also felt the engagement of the rotators attached to the trochanter, which in turn engage the movement of the sacrum and low back.  None of these deeper and more extensive engagements of rhythmic movement take place unless I have taken out the skin slack, and progressively increased and maintained the slack-out stretch to deeper tissues as movements progress.

This principle of "slack out" is the same for every body part(s) that I set into motion, and must be re-engaged every time I shift my hands position to another placement.  Otherwise I am just swishing superficial skin back and forth, and much of the movement never reaches deeper and more extensive tissues.

I will end with a brief personal anecdote from my practice.  I worked for about an hour and a half on a client, and as he came off the table he looked at me wide-eyed and said, "I could never tell where your hands were!"  Bingo.  I had had so much of his body--both in depth and extensiveness--set into motion and creating sensations from his own tissues that there was no sensory room left over to focus on what my hands were doing.  He became so engaged with the experience of himself that I was all but irrelevant.  This was one of the greatest complements I have ever received in my many years of working.

I hope this offers some insight into the idea of "taking out the slack," and why it is of central importance to every rhythmical movement we are introducing to the tissues.  If you wish to respond with comments or further questions, please feel free to contact me at deanejuhan@gmail.com.  I look forward to continuing dialogues on a wide variety of subjects.

A Nothing Thing

Milton Trager used to say, "My work is a nothing thing. It is just a feeling. We cannot achieve it by trying to force some physical condition into being."

Once when I was assisting him, after his demonstration he sent everyone off to do this nothing thing. As he observed the students trying to do nothing, he called over to one table across the room and said, "No, no, what you are doing is a nothing nothing. I am talking about a something nothing." This comment sent me on a years-long tailspin trying to figure out when nothing is really nothing and when it is something. Then I recalled him saying just as often, "You cannot figure it out, so don't try. Just go with it." After that the quandary quickly resolved and I thereafter thought nothing (not "not something") further about it.

However, I recently discovered this definition of "nothing" in my archives (if "archive" is the right word for boxes full of papers to be sorted out--probably not by me--later). I reread it with the same keenness (and no small touch of dizziness and nausea) that I experienced when I first encountered it. It occurs to me that it may be of some help who are themselves trying to figure out the distinctions--obviously so important to Milton--between "nothing," "nothing nothing," and "something nothing." There may be nothing more important for us to grips with as nothing. I offer up this philosophical discussion to that end, and I for one can positively attest to the fact that upon reading and rereading it I have truly come to understand nothing.

A DEFINITION OF NOTHING

The following entry is quoted in its entirety from a philosophical dictionary. Unfortunately my xeroxed copy of its pages have neither header or footer to indicate the specific work in which this definition is to be found. This is a serious bibliographical lack. On the other hand, there is a certain poetic justice in the fact that of the origins of the definition of “nothing,” nothing is known. But a lack is itself a nothing, where no-thing exists, and since, as King Lear observed, “nothing can come from nothing.” perhaps the problem is not as serious as it appears on its face, or in the minds of sticklers for resource details. If nothing comes of nothing, perhaps it is best under the circumstances to simply leave it at that. Nothing, at least, can be done about it here.

Perhaps there is really no pressing need (a lack?) in this world for clarity about nothing. We are tacitly accustomed to the fact that nothing is really clear as things stand that further inquiry is unnecessary. On the other hand, there is a rudimentary sense that the idea of “nothing” is somehow intwined with the idea of “something,” of which we all apparently desire to be a part. There is, then, some justification in wanting to understand something about the opposite camp, even if it cannot be said to positively exist. So let us strive, with the help below (in the infernal as well and the paragraphically spacial sense of the word) to understand nothing, which seems to be our natural inclination in any case.

Nothing is an awe-inspiring yet essentially undigested concept, highly esteemed by writers of a mystical or existentialist tendency, but by most others regarded with anxiety, nausea, or panic. Nobody seems to know how to deal with it (he would, of course), and plain persons generally are reported to have little difficulty in saying, seeing, hearing, and doing nothing. Philosophers, however, have never felt easy on the matter. Ever since Parmenides laid it down that it is impossible to speak of what is not, broke his own rule in the act of stating it, and deduced himself into a world where all that ever happened is nothing, the impression has persisted that the narrow path between sense and nonsense on this subject is a difficult one to tread and that altogether the less said of it the better.

This escape, however, is not as easy as it looks. Plato, in pursuing it, reversed the Parmenidean dictum by insisting, in effect, that anything a philosopher can find to talk about must somehow be there to be discussed, and so let loose upon the world that unseemly rabble of centaurs and unicorns, carnivorous cows, republican monarchs and wife-burdened bachelors, which has plagued ontology from that day to this. Nothing (of which they are all aliases) can apparently get rid of these absurdities, but for fairly obvious reasons has not been invited to do so. Logic has attempted the task, but with sadly limited success. Of some, though not all, nonentities, even a logician knows they do not exist, since their properties defy the law of contradiction; the remainder, however, are not so readily dismissed. Whatever Lord Russell may have said of it, the harmless if unnecessary unicorn cannot be driven out of logic as it can out of zoology, unless by desperate measures which exclude all manner of reputable entities as well. Such remedies have been attempted, and their effects are worse than the disease. Russell himself, in eliminating the present King of France, inadvertently deposed the current Queen of England. Quine, the sorcerers apprentice, has contrived to liquidate both Pegasus and President Truman in the same fell swoop. The old logicians, who allowed all entities subsistence while conceding existence, as wanted, to an accredited selection of them, at least brought a certain tolerant inefficiency to their task. Of the new it can only be said that solitudinem faciunt et pacem appelant—they make a desert and call it peace. Whole realms of being have been abolished without warning, at the mere nonquantifying of a variable. The poetry of Earth has been parsed out of existence—and what has become of it prose? There is little need for an answer. Writers to whom nothing is sacred, and accordingly stop thereat, have no occasion for surprise on finding, at the end of their operations, nothing is all they have left.

The logicians, of course, will have nothing of all this. Nothing, they say, is not a thing, nor is it the name of anything, being merely a short way of saying that it is not something else. “Nothing” means “not anything”; appearances to the contrary are due merely to the error of supposing that a grammatical subject must necessarily be a name. Asked, however, to prove that nothing is not the name of anything, they fall back upon the claim that nothing is the name of anything (since according to them there are no names anyway). Those who can make nothing of such an argument are welcome to the attempt. When logic falls out with itself, honest men come into their own, and it will take more than this to persuade them that there are not better cures for this particular headache than the old and now discredited method of cutting off the patient’s head.

The friends of nothing may be divided into two distinct yet not exclusive classes: the know-nothings, who claim a phenomenological acquaintance with nothing in particular, and the fear-nothings, who, believing, with Macbeth, that “nothing is but what is not,” are thereby launched into dialectical encounter with nullity in general. For the first, nothing, so far from being a mere grammatical illusion, is a genuine, even positive, feature of experience. We are all familiar with, and have a vocabulary for, holes and gaps, lacks and losses, absences, silences, impalpability’s, insipidities, and the like. Voids and vacancies of one sort or another are sought after, dealt in and advertised in the newspapers. And what are these, it is asked, but perceived fragments of nothingness, experiential blanks, which command, nonetheless, their share of attention and therefor deserve recognition. Sartre, for one, has given currency to such arguments, and so, in effect, have the upholders of “negative facts”—an improvident sect, whose refrigerators are full of nonexistent butter and cheese, absentee elephants and so on, which they claim to detect therein. If existence indeed precedes essence, there is certainly reason of a sort for maintaining that nonexistence is also anterior to, and not a product of, the essentially parasitic activity of negation; that the nothing precedes the not. But, verbal refutations apart, the short answer to this view, as given, for instance, in Bergson, is that there are but petty and partial nothings, themselves parasitic on what already exists. Absence is a mere privation, and a privation of something at that. A hole is always a hole in something: take away the thing, and the hole goes too; more precisely it is replaced bu a bigger if not better hole, itself relative to its surroundings, and so tributary to something else. Nothing, in short, is given only in relation to what is, and even the idea of nothing requires a thinker to sustain it. If we want to encounter it an sich, we have to try harder than that.

Better things, or rather nothings, are promised on the alternative theory, whereby it is argued, so to speak, not that holes are in things but that things are in holes or, more generally, that everything (and everybody) is in a hole. To be anything (or anybody) is to be bounded, hemmed in, defined, and separated by a circumambient frame of vacuity, and what is true of the individual is equally true of the collective. The universe at large is fringed with nothingness, from which indeed (how else?) it must have been created, if created it was; and its beginning and end, like that of all change within it, must similarly be viewed as a passage from one nothing to another, with an interlude of being in between. Such thoughts, or others like them, have haunted the speculations of nullophile metaphysicians from Pythagoras to Pascal and from Hegel to his followers to Heidegger, Tillich, and Sartre. Being and nonbeing, as they see it, are complimentary notions, dialectically entwined, and of equal status and importance; although Heidegger alone has extended their symmetry to the point of equipping Das Nichts with a correlative (if nugatory) activity of nothing, or nihilating, whereby it produces Angst in its votaries, and untimely hilarity in those, such as Carnap and Ayer, who have difficulty parsing “nothing” as a present participle of the verb “to noth.”

Nothing, whether it noths or not, and whether or not the being of anything entails it, clearly does not entail that anything should be. Like Spinoza’s substance, it is cause sui; nothing (except more of the same) can come of it; ex nihilo, nihil fit. That conceded, it remains a question to some why anything, rather than nothing, should exist. This is either the deepest conundrum in metaphysics or the most childish, and though many must have felt the force of it at one time or another, it is equally common to conclude, on reflection, that is is no question at all. The hypothesis of theism may be said to take is seriously and offer a provisional answer. The alternative is to argue that the dilemma is self-resolved in the mere possibility of stating it. If nothing whatsoever existed, there would be no problem and no answer, and the anxieties even of existential philosophers would be permanently laid to rest. Since they are not, there is evidently nothing to worry about. But that itself should be enough to keep and existentialist happy. Unless the solution be, as some have suspected, that it is not nothing that has been worrying them, but they who have been worrying it.

Multiple Sclerosis and The Trager Approach

One of the principal specialties that has emerged from his practice has been the treatment of various neurological disorders resulting from trauma or disease, including stroke, oxygen deprivation at birth, spinal cord damage, peripheral sensory and motor injuries, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, polio, and multiple sclerosis.

Download article.