Tissue Hydration and Movement – Keys to Keeping Your Body Young at Every Age
I think we can all agree that staying hydrated is a good thing and becoming dehydrated is not. To hydrate our body we tend to think first of drinking more water, and while drinking enough water is obviously necessary and important for our health, keeping all of our tissues well hydrated, particularly our connective tissue, benefits from a more nuanced approach.
To understand tissue hydration better it helps to understand a bit more about the tissue we’re hydrating. Connective tissue, which includes our ligaments, tendons and fascia, is a tissue framework that supports and connects, you could say holds together, other tissues in the body. Our connective tissue plays an extremely important role in human movement. When connective tissue is healthy and well hydrated, it allow our bodies to move in a wide variety of ways. Conversely, if our connective tissue is not well hydrated it tends to limit our mobility, adversely affecting the health many other tissues in the body.
Connective tissue is composed of cells, fibers and ground substance. Understanding ground substance, our connective tissue’s liquid component, is the key to understanding how to keep our connective tissue well hydrated .Ground substance is a clear, viscous fluid that is 70 percent water. It can vary in consistency from relatively thin and water like to thicker and more gel like. What gives ground substance this variability in consistency is the 30% non-water component, the glycoamindoglycans or GAG’s. GAGs act like a binding agent that draws water into the tissue and keeps it there. GAG’s therefore play an important role in keeping our connective tissue well hydrated.
In addition to its role in tissue hydration, ground substance also:
- Serves as a source of nutrition for our tissue
- Helps to disperse waste products from our tissue
- Acts as a lubricant and spacer between collagen fibers
- Is Thixotropic
In short, ground substance keeps our tissues fed, clean and lubricated while playing a key role in our movement. The ground substance can transform from gel to liquid, a quality called Thixotropy, and it’s this quality that explains in part why it is so important for human movement. Thixotropic fluids change when our environment and our movement changes, providing more support when we need it and less when we don’t.
This is something we can all feel. We recognize for example that our bodies feels stiffer when cold and looser when warm and that taking a hot bath or warming up the body with movement can help a stiff and sore back. But will drinking more water also help with a stiff and sore back? The answer is more complicated. Drinking more water can make more water available to our tissue, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into keeping our ground substance more fluid and our connective tissue better hydrated.
When addressing the health of our connective tissues it is important to understand that drinking more water only goes so far. We also need to move. Movement is essential for keeping our tissues mobile and hydrated, especially our connective tissue, and the fluidity of all of our tissue is compromised when we don’t move enough or with enough variety and frequency.
One reason movement is so important for tissue hydration is because it is needed to facilitate the feeding and cleansing functions of the ground substance, and this is especially important as we get older. As we age, the areas in our bodies where tissues become adhesive and stiff tend to increase. Past injuries, acute and chronic, along with the cumulative effect of poor and/or infrequent movement habits can lead to dried out tissue fibers. These fibers tend to stick to one another, causing the ground substance to decrease proportionally and the connective tissues to get less nutrition while allowing more waste products to accumulate.
This scenario can contribute to pain and tension patterns that limit our mobility further and before you know it, we feel old. Meanwhile, connective tissue that doesn’t move well limits the movement of the muscle tissue it supports. This makes it difficult to generate new muscle in these areas, contributing to a weakening body.
The good news is that this trend can be reversed! Movement always remains available to us, no matter our age. So it’s always a good idea to try to increase the quantity and quality and regularity of our movements.
Here are some suggestions that will, when done with regularity, promote hydration of all of the tissues, help maintain strength and promote good muscle tone and function:
Stretching: When done with good alignment and stable joints, stretching can help to increase the normal gliding of the connective tissue, allowing for greater range of motion for our muscles. Muscles with more range make it easier to move our joints and help to keep fluid in the joint capsules, maintaining their suppleness.
*Research has shown that while stretching initially decreases the water content of the tissue, after 30 minutes of rest, the water content increases beyond the pre-stretch quantity and remains higher for up to 3 hours afterwards!
Natural Human Movement: This is movement that takes joints through a wide range of motions. Walking is a great example of a natural human movement that can take a wide variety of our joints through a wide range of motion. In fact, did you know that walking can mobilize more joints in your body than running?
*Moving your joints to maintain health need not be done with strenuous activities!
Orthopedic Massage: Orthopedic massage was designed specifically to reintroduce motion into connective tissues to decrease pain. This technique involves sliding the fibers of connective tissue across each other to create friction that increases fluidity. This along with the gentle rocking motion of Orthopedic Massage and its passive joint mobilization help to increase fluid uptake in our tissues.
*Massage is a must if you are dealing with injuries that are keeping you from moving as freely as you could because of pain!
Personal Alignment Training and Re-education: If our joints do not line up well we will have a greater tendency toward tissue tension, tightness, stiffness and weakness, and these issues can lead to chronic movement pattern disorders and decreased mobility. Over time, decreased mobility can promote adhesions in the tissues fibers. Personal Alignment Training helps re-educate you on how to hold yourself in proper alignment, reducing pain due to poor movement habits and improving mobility. Ultimately this keeps your tissues better hydrated.
*Remember, adhesions are effectively dehydrated tissue. That is, tissue where the connective tissue fibers have dried out and become stuck to each other.
Staying properly hydrated is important at any age, but becomes more important as we get older. Hydration is not simply a matter of drinking more water, but to be more proactive about tissue hydration. As we age we tend to move less and develop more movement habits that cause or maintain chronic pain and injures. This leads to more adhesions, causing more pain and discomfort and decreasing our mobility. This in turn can cause us to move even less.
Keeping our tissues young, supple and hydrated need not be strenuous, it simply requires more varied and biomechanically sound human movement. Movement is the key to staying youthful and well hydrated.