While I was in massage school, we had two class mottos: one was ‘massage is love’, but the other was ‘bodies are gross and cool’. I use the second one more often…
Let me explain: bodies are amazing and super cool on the outside, but on the inside? We are a bowl of electrified jelly haunted by a ghost, piloting a meat mecha held up by a bone frame and covered in fascia and skin. Our guts are gloopy and weird and often our meat mecha breaks down. This post is dedicated to some of the weird glory I’ve learned about our bodies.
Blood Is Connective Tissue
But how? Isn’t blood a liquid? Well, yes it is, but it’s also connective tissue. Connective tissue is made up of fibrous components, ground substance (or intercellular matrix), and cells of various kinds. Blood is composed of platelets and fibrinogen, plasma, erythrocytes and leukocytes. When a blood vessel is broken, fibrinogen is converted to fibrin and forms clots with platelets to repair the damage and stop the bleeding, so there’s the fibrous component. Plasma is intercellular matrix, since it’s not made of cells or fibre. And erythrocytes and leukocytes are red and white blood cells. Also, blood runs throughout your body, connecting your organs and tissues together. And now you know why blood is a connective tissue.
Only One Tiny Joint Connects Your Arm to Your Skeleton
The clavicle (collarbone) is the only bone that holds your arm onto the rest of your skeleton. The clavicle is connected to the scapula (shoulder blade) at the acromioclavicular joint. Your humerus is connected to the scapula at the glenohumeral joint. But the only one of those bones connected to your skeleton is the clavicle, at the sternoclavicular joint. That’s right, the sternum, that tiny bone in the middle of your chest at the base of your throat, is the ONLY PLACE your arm is attached to your skeleton; all the other attachments are muscle, tendon, ligament, and skin. There is a theoretical joint called the scapulothoracic joint, but really that’s just your shoulder blade inside a meat sandwich floating over your ribcage. I am shocked that we are not constantly tearing our arms off.
Your Spinal Fluid Is Moving
The cerebrospinal fluid that surrounds your brain and spinal cord is constantly in motion, flowing around your nervy goo and up and down your spine. Some manual therapists can feel the rhythm of that flow in various parts of the body by cradling the back of your head, putting one hand on the base of your skull and another on your sacrum, or even holding your toes or hip bones. That pulse is called craniosacral rhythm, and it’s driven by breath causing pressure which moves the sphenoid bone in your skull back and forth, pumping the CSF around your brain and spinal cord. And yes, the bones in your skull do move, as mentioned in a previous post.
There Are Muscles in Front of Your Spine
I don’t know why I found this so disturbing, but behind your larynx and thyroid cartilage and esophagus and trachea and all the more visible outside muscles of your neck, you also have muscles growing right on the front of your spine. Longus capitis and longus colli help you bend your neck forward and sideways. These muscles are easily damaged by whiplash, but less easy to get at for massage, so if you’ve had whiplash or a concussion and all the neck muscles you can feel seem fine but you still get headaches and neck pain, those front-of-spine muscles might need some attention. There’s also psoas further down, but that set of muscles disturbs me less for no real reason.
The Tongue Is Like an Octopus Arm
Tongues, like octopus arms, are muscular hydrostats. Most of your muscles develop attached to at least two bones, which they pull around so your meat mecha can move. But the tongue is a loose and flappy muscle that doesn’t really have any bones to move. Eight muscles got together and formed a flexible, liquidy matrix so that they could move around in different directions. Muscles can only produce motion by contracting, so the outside four of the muscles of the tongue are anchored to the skull in different places in antagonist pairs and the rest are inside like a sort of core. The inside ones are arranged with their fibres in different directions so your tongue can wiggle around in all kinds of shapes to eat, or to make words so people’s meat mechas can communicate with each other.
There are lots of other weird and wonderful body facts that were foisted upon me at massage school, but this post is getting long and I need material for other posts later, so stay tuned for what is sure to be a series of posts about how gross and cool human bodies are.