Asking for a Friend - Health, Fitness & Personal Growth Tips for Women in Midlife

Ep.142 Unlocking Midlife Vitality: How Fascia Holds the Key to Chronic Pain Relief and Wellness with Anna Rahe

• Michele Henning Folan • Episode 142

Share episode

Are Midlife Aches and Pains More Than Just Aging? Discover the Role of Fascia in Your Health

Ladies, are you tired of feeling like your body is constantly fighting against you as you navigate midlife? It might not just be aging—your fascia could be the key. Join me as I sit down with Anna Rahe, a fascia-based movement coach whose inspiring journey from chronic pain to healing will shift how you see your body. As a former dancer and Pilates instructor, Anna faced her own struggles with severe health issues and found little relief in traditional medicine. But her discovery of fascia completely transformed her life—and now, she’s here to share how this overlooked tissue can unlock a new path to feeling better.

In this episode, we dive deep into how fascia—this connective tissue that surrounds your muscles and organs—impacts everything from posture to joint pain, and how it stores your life’s experiences. Anna’s personal experience sheds light on the critical role fascia plays, especially as we experience hormonal shifts during midlife. She’ll explain how it’s intertwined with conditions like fibromyalgia, and why understanding fascia might be the missing piece in your chronic pain puzzle.

But we don’t stop there. We challenge what you know about Pilates and yoga and explore how fascia’s fluid dynamics can help ease stress and improve mobility. Instead of rigid mechanics, Anna shares how fluid movement can restore vitality and rejuvenate your body in ways you never imagined.

This episode is a wake-up call to treat your body holistically and embrace the power of fascia care. If you’re ready to take control of your health and age with more grace, vitality, and freedom, this conversation is for you. 

Anna is graciously offering Asking for a Friend listeners a FREE 7-day Body Revival - here is the link! https://gstvitalifestudio.com/checkout/new?o=194964

You can find Anna Rahe at:

https://gstbody.com/

https://www.annarahe.com/

https://www.instagram.com/gstbody/

Send us a text

_________________________________________
Are you ready to reclaim your midlife body and health? I went through my own personal journey through menopause, the struggle with midsection weight gain, and feeling rundown. Faster Way, a transformative six-week group program, set me on the path to sustainable change. I'd love to work with you! Let me help you reach your health and fitness goals.
https://www.fasterwaycoach.com/?aid=MicheleFolan

Have questions about Faster Way? Feel free to reach out.
mfolanfasterway@gmail.com

Follow Asking for a Friend on Social media outlets:
https://www.instagram.com/askingforafriend_pod/
https://www.facebook.com/askforafriendpod/

Please provide a review and share. This helps us grow!
https://lovethepodcast.com/AFAF

*Transcripts are done with AI and may not be perfectly accurate.

**This podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical advice. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions.

Michele Folan:

Health, wellness, fitness and everything in between. We're removing the taboo from what really matters in midlife. I'm your host, Michele Folan, and this is Asking for a Friend. Oh, the aches and pains of midlife. Do you ever get out of bed in the morning and feel as if you've shrunk overnight and every joint is creaking as you try to gingerly walk to the bathroom? How about that twinge in your knee? Or that hip pain that you get when you're walking up steps? Or, better yet, the nagging GI issues? Is it possible they could be related? Anna Rahe is a fascia-based movement coach who, over her 25 plus year career, has helped thousands of women in midlife find lasting change by restoring their bodies. As the founder of GST Body, Anna ran various studios, lectured and taught globally and spent time on the faculty at the University of San Francisco. She's worked with celebrities like Robert Downey Jr and Emmy Rossum. Anna has been featured in Shape, Elle, the Wall Street Journal and more. Anna Rahe, welcome to Asking for a Friend.

Anna Rahe:

Hi, thanks for having me, Michele. It's a pleasure to be here.

Michele Folan:

Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. And when I you know, your publicist had reached out about being a guest on the show. It could not be more perfect for this age group. So I was really excited to get you booked, because I know aches and pains are one of the things that women in this age group often complain about. We blame it on menopause or osteoarthritis, like I said, but we don't really know for sure in many, many cases. So I would love for you first to just tell us a little bit more about you and your path to becoming a fascia expert.

Anna Rahe:

Yeah, Okay, that's a great place to start because it kind of has a inverted story. I was 18 and I felt like I was living in a body that was 80 and that is not hyperbole. I literally felt so restricted and in pain and aches and sharp and dull kinds of you know muscular, skeletal. But I also had more severe symptoms like digestive issues and respiratory issues and depression and sleep problems, and I kept kind of like circling to so many different professionals just asking, trying to deal with symptoms right, and trying to find, like what the cause was. Because I was 18, I should have been, I mean, for all intensive purposes I'd walk in and they'd think that I was really healthy. All my blood work looked great and all my stats were fine and I looked flexible because I was a dancer or I was trying to have a dance career. I was a Pilates instructor, so I knew bodies pretty well at that point. I'd gotten certified quite young and I would just go to people and they'd run additional tests. I had MRIs, I'd have CAT scans, I'd have, you know, this poop test and this, you know, colonoscopy, and just trying to kind of put together the forensics. That was wrong and no one really could touch into it. And I started noticing that there was kind of like these through lines that like if I had a lot of severe muscular skeletal pain, it would also show up in that I would.

Anna Rahe:

I was a runner and just stay fit for dance. And so some days I'd go out and I'd run through Golden Gate Park and I'd feel like I was training for a marathon. I had power and I had respiratory health and vitality. And I would go three days later and do the exact same run and I felt like a 10 pack a day smoker. Oh wow. And it was like literally like I needed an inhaler and I couldn't get up the hill and my muscles were cramping.

Anna Rahe:

And so I started to really look at my own journey and be like these symptoms actually seem very different because we parcel the body out into different body parts rather than seeing it as an integrated whole. And especially, this was true way back this is 25 years ago and so every specialist was, like you know, trying to poke into their specialty, but no one was looking. Cross-discipline being like this could be something like this. Even the East and West integrative medicine doctors that I went to, Even the East and West integrative medicine doctors that I went to.

Anna Rahe:

There was good training. I mean, I've taken pieces from things that I learned in my journey and obviously implemented into what I do today. But I think that as a whole, people still look about it in a Pilates certification rolfing Like it was a kind of an extra workshop you could take and it was on the emotional body, not about muscular, skeletal stuff. And this woman just introduced me and so at one point I was like in San Francisco, just desperate, I was miserable, I was like scared because I was like I can't live like this for the rest of my life.

Michele Folan:

And it felt like no one could help me. Well, you didn't know, you didn't know you could have had MS Like all these. Like you start thinking of these phantom, like diseases that you know.

Anna Rahe:

That's right, and your brain kind of goes scary and goes haywire, right, sure. And so at one point I think it was a divine intervention I was just like laying on my studio reformer I was teaching out of my house at the time and attending the University of San Francisco, and I remember just laying there and being like this is not muscle, this is not bone, and I was poking around in my guts and I think it was this divining moment where I was like could this be fascia? Wait a second, what is fascia? I know what it is in my head, but I didn't really remember. So I started just kind of doing this deep dive into fascia and it turned into a 25-year journey of just refining and a lot of the stuff that I was finding wasn't answering the experiences that I was having.

Anna Rahe:

Back 25 years ago, most of fascia work was done with manual therapy. It wasn't really the focus of movement yet, and so I would. I got rolfed all the time, and sometimes rolfing would flare up my symptoms and not help them. And other times, what's rolfing? Okay, rolfing is a type of body work started by Ida Rolf. She was a brilliant thought leader in alignment, being a source for vitality in the body and being able to fix posture through working with the connective tissue system. And so she found ways of actually taking the fascia and using manual techniques, kind of like sculpting right and trying to get fascia. It's very much a kind of attractioning and pulling on skin. It's very painful. It's very painful if you talk to anyone and they tend to cry because it probably releases things, and I did. I was 20 when I had my first session, 18 when I yeah something around there when I had my first session series of 10. And so it's just a. It's a viable work. It has other branches, like Heller work, and it has roots some shared with Andrew Tiller Still's work, who he was the father of osteopathy. He was tapping into more of the visceral aspects of fascia and so it's kind of like all of the you know fringe healers were tapping into this thing, but there wasn't a lot of science behind it at this point, and so they used their language to try to describe what they were finding and what they were feeling. And it was a pretty cool, magical time because it was like the very first peek behind the curtain of like what is this stuff and why, and so it was really interesting, even though they're still really focused on the structural aspect of fascia, which is like the fiber type and we can get into that a little bit later.

Anna Rahe:

When it comes to what we're doing, that either hurts it or why we're experiencing pain in it. What causes restriction? But the fibroastic and the structure of it rather than actually the fluidity of it. And so I found that sometimes I would go and have these sessions and I would feel looser, but it always would come back. My tensions would always come back, my tensions would always come back. And then I would also sometimes have flare-ups where I'm like you released this, but now I have chronic nerve pain shooting up my neck and I'm like what is that? And so it was an interesting journey really of forensics, trying to figure out and just questioning. And so my journey ended up leading me to two really important things about fascia is that the greatest influence of our fascia is really our motion, which I would kind of experience.

Anna Rahe:

I'd have the therapeutic to try to heal it and then I'd go out and dance and ruin it, and I'm like some of the stuff that I'm being taught in my Pilates and yoga and all of those physical disciplines are actually contributing to the condition of this.

Anna Rahe:

So I had to go in and try to like take apart and deconstruct what I was taught, because as a student and 18 years old, I was like my teachers know the best and they're telling me the best of the best. And I went to the I literally was studying in the best certification programs in the world and I'm like, but something is wrong. And so I had to kind of go rogue and I just started kind of questioning everything I was taught and started doing the opposite. And as soon as I started doing the opposite I started to heal in a really significant way. And then I started teaching my Pilates clients that and they started seeing the differences. And then I decided I need to figure out what the science is. And then there was more science available, probably 15 years ago when the fascial Congress came in. So I started researching that kind of stuff.

Michele Folan:

All right, oh man gosh. So it is a lot, I mean, and I I've got all these questions. So, first of all, you're very young when all this is going on. And so I immediately was thinking, oh my God, you could have had an autoimmune disease. There could like all these weird things, because one day you'd be great, the next day not so great. Did anyone else in your family experience any of these types of issues?

Anna Rahe:

No, no, no, not that I know of. I do know now in hindsight that and I still don't have a diagnosis just so I know, so that you don't have to have a diagnosis to find healing, is a really good message for people. To find a solution does not require having a very concrete diagnosis. I think there's a lot of different aspects. I have sexual trauma in my past which creates emotional and hormonal imbalances in the tissues which contribute to it. I had some physical kind of like mild but not severe scoliosis. In fact most x-rays don't show scoliosis, but I had a lot of tissue scoliosis, which is an interesting torsion of the way that the tissues lay out and are formed over the skeletal structures Not really talked about that often and not addressed at all.

Anna Rahe:

And so my mom has some of that and I think she experienced, especially growing up. She would have been in her, like she was a later mom and so she was like maybe in her mid fifties when she started having lots of aches and pains, and so at that point I was kind of able to start putting her on GST stuff and doing work with her and she was finding great reprieve, and so I think that that's probably a genetic component too as well. I mean, I say that there's like three or four different imprints that really kind of show up our body narrative and fascia holds that story kind of like the way you can see rings on a tree that tell you when good years of growth and great years of irrigation and when the bugs came in and when there was fire, you can really see a history inside the rings of a tree. And the same is really true with your fascia. If we get into that, you know kind of more of the emotional and psychological loading on the tissues.

Anna Rahe:

But I don't know, I don't know what the exact diagnosis was, but I think that there was probably some genetic thing. But I think that it's a combination right, it's always a combination of how we're living experience, how we've been put together in the womb and you know divine design, if you believe in that kind of stuff, and that's our story and our task to deal with. Right Is to know, and what's fun is that fascia has an answer for that.

Michele Folan:

And I do believe that life experiences and how we handle them emotionally and how we bottle them up or express them can absolutely affect our health in a multitude of ways. So I hear that loud and clear with you. Can you explain for the audience a little bit what fascia really is, kind of differentiating it from your skeletal system, cartilage, all that?

Anna Rahe:

So I'm going to give the most succinct. I love going into the science and I'm going to try to like narrow it down. The term fascia is referring to a generic type of body tissue, a type of connective tissue that's everywhere in your body. It's kind of, when you say the word fascia, it's kind of akin to being like my shirt is made of cotton or my jeans or my pants are made of linen. So we have a bunch of different types of fascia loose and reticular, and all these types of fascia in the way that it looks kind of like fabric. So you have Gore-Tex for heavy sportswear and then you have daily wear of your jeans and that's kind of like the musculoskeletal fascia, the myofascia.

Anna Rahe:

When you come back out from just a tissue kind of perspective, fascia actually is really significant because it organizes a complete body system, similar to your digestive system and your cardiovascular system and your endocrine system. This body system comes complete with its own organs. They are not masked organs like a heart or a lung that are very obvious, which is one of the reasons. In dissection for years anatomical dissection they kind of just pulled fascia out of the way, thinking oh, this is superfluous, it's everywhere and it's in the way. Instead of thinking, holy cow, there's a lot of it, it might have a lot of significance, we should probably look at it. However, the fascial organs are layered organs and they layer around every other system. So you have myofascia is the organization of fascia around the muscular skeletal system, and you have viscera, which is the way fascia organizes around your vital organs, and it goes on and on. You have quite a few and we're still discovering all of the types of. You have the interstitium and there's a bunch of different ways that fascia organizes into organs.

Anna Rahe:

In its greatest capacity, fascia is kind of like your body's energetic smart grid.

Anna Rahe:

It takes high voltage load from our workouts, from our picking up our kids, carrying our groceries, sitting for hours all of this loading in from gravity and actually interfaces it with the low frequency energy of the heartbeat and the lungs. Fascia is the reason that your heart can beat with an electrical output next to your lungs and not have interference. And so, on the backside, fascia in the netting has this organizational quality of all of these things in our bodies that help to interface and function all the other body systems. It's kind of a master system, like the nervous system, and when you start digging into it, what it needs to stay healthy, to do its job is pretty significant because it's compromised condition effects which is why I had digestive issues, which is why I had aches and pains, which is why I couldn't sleep because it's literally setting the parameters of optimization energetic optimization from cells all the way up to your skin, all the way up to your cerebral thought processes and the frequencies of your brain activity.

Michele Folan:

Oh, okay, this was such a better explanation of fascia. Good, good, because what people will often say is well, you know, like you know, when you're cutting chicken breast up and there's that little thin layer of stuff, that white stuff that you pull off the chicken, well, that's your fascia.

Anna Rahe:

Yeah, and then you're like, well, great, but what does it?

Michele Folan:

You know it's out of context Correct, so that's super interesting. So how does fascia change as we age, particularly during midlife?

Anna Rahe:

Yeah, so fascia is very sensitive to what I call chemical cocktails of experience, and that's basically our hormone and neurotransmitter operations. Right, it's the biochemical part of who we are in a chemical form. And so fascia contracts to physical loading, but also to our psychological and hormonal loading. And as women, we know that we are much more hormonally alive and dynamic than our counterpart. And inside of that, fascia is busy trying to figure out how to react and distribute and communicate on these kind of levels in terms of the sensory input and how it's going to integrate and move out of the body.

Anna Rahe:

Fascia has got a huge metabolic activity in our body and in its hormonal phases it actually influences how we constrict or conform our restrictions, how our bodies contort, how our organs sit, the internal tonality, the inner space dynamics.

Anna Rahe:

So all of a sudden, when you like, have, let's say, fluctuations in estrogen and it's very sensitive to estrogen.

Anna Rahe:

And we don't totally know all of the reasons.

Anna Rahe:

We just know that, yes, this is why fibromyalgia is much more commonly diagnosed in women than men.

Anna Rahe:

This is why during the menses and even if, even if you're postmenopausal, you can actually still have surges and affect the different types of tensions in your body based upon these hormones, and what's interesting is that you're mostly hormonally active in the thoracic cavity and so fascia tends to restrict there, become overly dry, overly rigid, and then it will actually take away from the strength and the elasticity in your muscles of the limbs, which is where we tend to get aches and pains in our knee joints, low back problems, cervical spine, as it's exiting the body as the hormones are trying to process into motion.

Anna Rahe:

That's the way that fascia metabolizes the stresses, and so most women would probably feel quite a flux. As their complementary system, the endocrine system is trying to figure out how it's working, and it's interesting also that the endocrine system is what is the primary channel of our estrogen brain, and the brain in a woman fires mostly through the estrogen channels and in that it'll be affected also through the consciousness of our body sensory system in fascia. So there's quite a few different connective ways that it affects women in middle age and later age.

Michele Folan:

So it just in terms of the joint pain, posture, mobility, realm okay because I think that's something that we live with every day. How do we differentiate between what could be fascia and what would be maybe osteoarthritis or some kind of joint issue?

Anna Rahe:

It's a really good question. I think that the basic line for people is how they're, but it takes body awareness to do that. Let me just think about how to explain this, because I was going to say feeling it. There are different. There's so many different ways of feeling pain and different receptors give off different information.

Anna Rahe:

I think that by the time you're 50, lifestyles and the way we use our body naturally leads to degenerative capsules and the arthritic, osteoarthritic conditions. That doesn't have to be the case if you catch it early enough. So there's a level of that and fascia really works with that more in terms of the compression versus the traction tensions. You will feel it more towards the skeletal system. If you are really experiencing osteoarthritis, you will feel it more in the dense tissues and each tissue has a different kind of sensation. So you'll say, okay, I feel like my knee feels stiff. That would be fascia. If you feel like your knee won't hold you and there's too much like power that's going through the or force that's going through the capsule, you'll probably have some type of surface reticulation. If there's severe restriction in your joints, it's probably osteoarthritic and not just fascia, Because then you're changing the actual shape of the capsule, and that will change range of motion.

Michele Folan:

When you were talking about when you were younger and some of the GI issues that you were having that were, you know, fascia related. So I get how, if you were experiencing a joint issue and working with that fascia-related. So I get how, if you were experiencing a joint issue and working with that fascia through movement and through massage and stretching and all that, how do you affect some of those inner systems that aren't necessarily accessible with?

Anna Rahe:

The hand. Such a good question, oh my gosh, thank you. This is my jam. I love the muscular, skeletal stuff, but I really like whole body care. What I do is we talk about it holistic body care because fascia is then innervated, which just means wired deeply into your ANS, your autonomic nervous system. So it is an autonomic function and has deep, deep influence over things that you usually can't control. However, fascia has the ability to contract like a muscle Okay, it has cells that, like a muscle, can actively contract on command. You can control the way your fascia contracts. And this was really the nucleus of what started my journey.

Anna Rahe:

Of freedom is because I would go out and have all these people rub on me and try to touch me in these places, and there were simply places that people couldn't touch and I'm like you can't get deep enough, you can't actually get your guts under the lining of my. But what I discovered first through the myofascia is that if I moved my fascia in a very similar way, I would do hours of laying on balls and I'd feel my fascia melt and spread and release, and then I'd get up and it would all tighten up again and I'm like this is not sustainable. I cannot lay for three hours a night. Someday I want kids, someday I want to have a career. So I was like, what if I could do the thing that that ball is doing? What if I could command it? What if I could control that? So this spreading flexion, this flux of tissue. So I started studying that and I could do it on command, and I could do it regularly.

Anna Rahe:

What was really cool is that that action can be done by the fascia that surrounds your organs. So if you have a lack of motility around a part of your intestines, you can go in and teach the tissue how to actually contract in a way that starts to free up the fiber, so energy moves through that, so that it takes the kink out and diverticulitis doesn't become an issue. Or it can actually help to move the flora of your guts in a more healthy motility. And so the fascia that I love dealing with is being able to teach people how to do this on command, because, all of a sudden, the fact that you can control it and the fact that it's wired to autonomic functions that's how I healed my respiratory system, because I could actually control the way the lining of the lungs and the fascia around my lungs behaved, and when you do that, all of a sudden you have greater reach inside. It's an inside job. Fascia gives you much better access to changing things that were previously thought to be inaccessible.

Michele Folan:

All right. So I get how, like stress and anxiety could restrict the movement of your fascia, like you physically can tighten things up in your body.

Anna Rahe:

Feel it yeah.

Michele Folan:

Yeah, feel it through emotion right. So, how do you release that without touching?

Anna Rahe:

it? It's a great question. You actually have to move it. Okay, whether you touch it from the outside. We do a lot of touching because it's educational.

Anna Rahe:

But once you teach the tissue to do it, fascia naturally has this flux.

Anna Rahe:

Okay, fascia force comes in stress, whatever you want to call it it can be psychological stress or stress load on the tissue and it fluxes and it uses its flux to send that energy across the broadband fibers of the netting, the whole wide network.

Anna Rahe:

In that process it's distributing and diluting the impact of that stress load. If you don't dilute it, if you don't share it and distribute it, then you can get what's called contracture in the tissue and most people don't have healthy ways of dealing with their stress. They don't know how to create that kind of freedom of release through purposefully putting their stresses into animation. And so we live with constant contracture in our tissues and over time that actually can create even additional stress on the body, because fascia that doesn't move doesn't distribute and when you have that, you have these hubs of high density, high stress load areas, and that's usually what tends to lock the system down and start to create more pathologies like body-wide pathologies. So really, what you need to learn how to do is move your fascia. And if you understand the principles, even if you don't move the fascia, you can move your body in ways that elicit the organic function of fascia.

Anna Rahe:

Most people just need to learn to use their fascia again because their system that is naturally occurring is broken. It is so restricted, it's so locked down that they have to reprogram it if that makes sense. That's where the therapy comes in, right. Yeah, but if you know the right things that fascia needs in movement and in energetics, all of a sudden you can just do that through your day, you can do that in a stressful situation, and your fascia will release immediately. It would put you into parasympathetic response mode and calm the nervous system, and so all of a sudden, your body becomes a tool, right, a really highly evolved kind of pitching fork, tuning fork for the tensions that we have as well as provides the solution. And you have to put every single stress in your life into motion, whether it's emotion, energy in motion or whether it's physical motion, and that's where fascia has the same interface to do both of those things.

Michele Folan:

Right. And so then I'm starting to think okay, so if you don't address it, this is where chronic inflammation and everything kind of comes into play. So it's important to address it, and so I understand. That was how the nervous system and the muscular system, when you say moving, moving, so give me an example, great, okay.

Anna Rahe:

So let's say this real quickly for your listener. Your muscular system and your fascial system are wired very differently to your nervous system. One is an adrenal system it is to be your getaway car. Your muscles are made to be activated for high power, for short loads of time, okay. Fash. On the other hand, is wired deeply into your endorphin system, the relaxation system, the ease system, the relaxation system, the ease, and one is the activated and one is the releasing, and so they kind of play together.

Anna Rahe:

The problem is is that most of us in physical activity and in our motion are taught to actively, especially as we age, strengthen, strengthen, tone, strengthen tone and we're activating and overstimulating the muscular system, which triggers the chemical cocktail of stress adrenal stress, cortisol, right, and so fascia provides a completely different view of how motion can be nutritious and actually put you in different straights, which is different states, which is de-adrenalizing, which is actually kind of medicine as a counter chemical experience and allows for more freedom to happen. And this comes down to a biomechanical model. I will try to keep this really short for people and then I'll give you examples. Our biomechanical model in strength and conditioning is based upon solid mechanics where the bones are levers and your muscles are pulleys and you tighten and pull to make your body work. Fascia is 70% water. It is still an animating system. It contracts and it moves energy, but it's a fluid body system and it changes the science of motion from solid mechanics to fluid dynamics. For those of you who do not remember physics, fluid dynamics is how force moves through a fluid and the most simple kind of sample of that that someone would know is a syringe. You have a cylinder, a tube, and you have a plunger and you can pull the plunger through the tube and suck water in and push water out. Suck water in, push water out.

Anna Rahe:

Fascia is organized in micro and in nano and in bigger and bigger myofascial tubes. Your body is more a set of tubes and cylinders than it is sticks, and so, all of a sudden, the requirements to move water and to create hydration and to actually displace force comes through the power of moving water, not through moving our solids Principles. Like women spend years trying to tighten their core, get flat stomachs, tighten and tighten. Then they show up in the middle of their 50s and they're like why do I have belly fat? Because your muscles don't. Nothing in your torso moves, movement has to have. Movement is the prerequisite for metabolic activity and so all your fat's going to store where there's no movement.

Anna Rahe:

So fascia comes in and says we need to open up our tubes, which means you cannot do crunches anymore. You have to actually have actions that pull the syringe which is called traction. It also happens to be decompressive of joints, which helps to produce synovial fluid and protect against osteoarthritis. You need compression, moves, which is pushing the water through the tube and starts to clear and move toxins and give better cellular health. Traction and compression is this syringe. And then you need one other kind of movement and it's called rotation. And rotation is actually kind of this picture of double helix. If you take a tube and you twist it, it kind of creates this kind of double helix shape which has compression and traction compression on one side, traction on the other, and so these three motions literally wash your tissues and move static energy to dilute it and displace it and move.

Anna Rahe:

And so most of our movement is not big enough and is not fluid enough and does not move water and is not fluid enough and does not move water, and so, as we're already aging and losing the juiciness of our tissues, the collagen and the elastin and the flexibility. We continue to dehydrate ourselves through the types of movement that we do. And then we get more and more rigid and more and more dried out and we're like, why are we feeling like I'm squeaking like the tin man who's squeaking like the oil, or the tin man who's squeaking all the time? So it's a kind of a different approach and you need to. We need to just reframe it and then there's wonderful, really simple ways that people can do this throughout their day.

Anna Rahe:

The other thing that makes fascia kind of polarizes our movement experience is that we're taught to do large block chunk exercise and fascia says I don't. You wouldn't eat your meal 3000 calories in one sitting. Why would you do that to your body? Through motion, which is excessive load, it generates tension. So fascia says the best route for me is microdosing snack motion throughout your day 10 minutes here, three seconds here, pull and traction for 30 seconds and move on.

Anna Rahe:

And so, all of a sudden, women need to look around their world and be like my life is my jungle gym. I need to find surfaces to hang off of railings, banisters, car windows, chain link fences, mailbox on my walk and do these three movements traction, compression and rotation and if you do that throughout your day, your fascia in general will have much better elasticity. Hydration glide like lack of friction, right, dehydrated things get friction on them, and so that's one approach is how do you layer it into your daily activity? And then you also want to be like. I need an actual ritual of care, because, just like any car needs maintenance, the more you drive it, the more care it needs, and so the body needs those too, and so it would. Similar biomechanics, but different principles in terms of what you can get the body to be healthy and strong.

Michele Folan:

Okay, I think this would be a great time to take a quick break and when we come back, I want you to share a patient success story with me. Does this sound familiar? When menopause hit, I didn't fully comprehend what was happening to my body. Even though I was eating 1200 calories a day, doing the elliptical at the gym and going to multiple cycling classes during the week, the scale was not budging and my genes were getting tighter. I was frustrated and wanted to do better for my long-term health and, with my 26 years in the health industry, I knew this was not the path I wanted to follow. So I started doing research on several online programs, but most were either fitness or nutrition-based, but not both. What I needed was a platform that understood the needs and challenges of women my age and had the data to prove it.

Michele Folan:

While scrolling through Instagram, one day, I stumbled upon Faster Way. Their science-backed strategy spoke to me and I decided to give it a go and invest in myself and my future health. I was 59 years old and full of hope, and I did go into it, knowing that I had to be patient, and the improved mindset did pay off. My results got me really excited to share Faster Way with other women who were struggling like I was. So I decided to get trained and certified as a coach. Call it self-care. Call it prioritizing your health. When are you going to tell yourself enough is enough and that you matter? Don't allow your past failures with other diets and programs to keep you from making one of the most important decisions for your future. I'd love to work with you. Reach out by DMing me on social media or at the email address in the show notes of this episode. Okay, we are back. I would love to hear about a patient that you have helped with these fascis techniques Perfect.

Anna Rahe:

Let's call her Sally, it's really good. Sally came in to me at 39. She was actually a chiropractor, which is kind of interesting, knew a lot about the skeletal system and muscles and she was very protective of her information but also of her body and she was miserable because she had tons of pain. But she also wanted to work out because she had started putting on middle age weight. She had had a baby later in life through IVF, which also changed and messed up her hormones and she's like I just feel like my body is haywire. And when I first started to touch in on her body I got a lot of don't touch me there, you're going to hurt me. This isn't fun. And I was like okay, okay, okay and pretty soon I was able to have her start feeling deeply.

Anna Rahe:

One of the most beautiful parts about fascia is it really connects all people, but especially women who tend to kind of live out of body deeper into themselves, a deeper sense of connection to self and within. I mean she was really consistent. She was very like okay, I went home and I had two days of no pain and I was like great, and then that two days turned into five days of no pain and then all of a sudden, in a month, she's like you know what? My bowel movements are so much more regular. I've started to lose some of my belly fat and I'm like great, okay, we weren't doing cardio. She's like I was like don't do cardio, we're just going to do the moving of your fascia, for right now, let's make it therapeutic, cause she was afraid, so afraid of getting more hurt. And so I tend to end up getting people who have complicated bodies and are afraid of getting hurt and have searched for everything. And so after about two to three months, she's like okay, now I want to go into the aesthetics. She was a Westside LA wife and she was like my calves are too big to fit in my boots and I'm like, okay, let's try working on that.

Anna Rahe:

And so we went into all different areas of how fascia can help with structural things, toning, digestive issues, and she actually is one of the people who I'm still very close to. She does our stuff, because she's like, as soon as you get out of pain, this is the lifestyle you want. This is something that you grow old with. This is the body care that I was trying to provide my clients, that I wanted, and she's like what's really interesting is that her success story is like I had all this knowledge. We have all this information to different experts and stuff, but none of those visions are really integrated.

Anna Rahe:

Where your workout hurts you and you know you have to lift weights and keep your osteoporosis away, but then you have to go and have all these other therapies to try to counteract that, and it's like what if your movement, if you could change how it would become your medicine? And all of a sudden, what if your movement, if you could change how it would become your medicine? And all of a sudden she's like I'm sold. This is the way that I have kept my weight off. She looks amazing and her headaches are gone. She had migraines, jaw problems, tmj, just all of these things that were all locked into the tissues and they slowly unravel the more that you can just be in and be present and work with what you have.

Anna Rahe:

And then fascia is endlessly, endlessly transformative. It's actually interesting that it is so restorative that after seven months they're finding that 90% of intermuscular fascia is renewed. It's a very high cellular turnover, which is really hopeful for people like me and Sally, who are like had so much damage she had worked out her whole life. She started off as an actress and she just was like I know my body and but all of it was just frenetic and locked her up and created injury.

Anna Rahe:

And that's usually where people get spun off by 50. You can't do the workouts you did by 55. You don't want to do the workouts you did, right, they don't feel good. And so all of a sudden you're like what's the next step for me? I need something that's sustainable, that actually ages me backwards, and that's what was really fun is to watch Sally, and that was also my experience. I have literally felt like I've aged backwards because I was feeling 80 and she came in feeling 80. And then, as you start to restore your fascia, it takes years off. It's the rejuvenating system which takes stress and eliminates it from your system.

Michele Folan:

So you work with clients and then do you send them home with I don't want to say homework, but do you send them home with things that they are to be doing at home as well.

Anna Rahe:

Yes. So I think the best clarification is that it's not like physical therapy, because no one does their exercises and when you do your exercises you're probably doing them wrong. Right, because they're not, they're isolated. They're like let me just tighten my glute because I have hip problems. The answer to everybody's perspective of pain is to tighten more. You're lacking strength, so then they're tightening it more and it's like over stripping the bolts.

Anna Rahe:

So the way that I first work with people is I really encourage people to learn their bodies and learn these principles of body care. You come to me and I say every practitioner who you go to for help has only three tools. They use a stick called lever, they apply force and to get flow. Chiropractors use your skeletal lever. They apply force and to get flow. Chiropractors use your skeletal system. They apply their own application of force and they try to get their skeletal system to move in joints. Massage therapists go in and they push with their arms as levers into your muscle to try to get more glide and more flow. Acupuncturists use the lever of a needle and they stick it in your meridian to try to get the cheetah flow. And every body has five levers, two legs, two arms and a spine that you can learn to configure in different shapes. You put movement, which implies force, and then, when I teach you how to move fascia correctly, you're distributing that tension into flow.

Anna Rahe:

And so all of a sudden, you become your own practitioner. You are the active participant in the condition of your health. Rather than I go to someone, they take care of me and I need them twice a week in order to stay out of pain. It's like that's prison, that's not freedom, and so that's how I work with people is. It's very much an education, a conversation with the body. You can't have anyone do it for you, you just can't. And if you can, how's that going for you? Are you still having aches and pains? Do you still have a dependency on right? And so it's really a call for people to learn enough about their body that they can do stuff and not just topical right. We can do a diet, we can do a detox, we can do a strength training course, but then we come home and we still feel somewhat broken. But if you start from fascia on the inside, then vitality follows through into every area of your life. Cognitive fascia is very rooted to cognitive health. Go ahead, sorry.

Michele Folan:

Oh no, no. No, you were on a roll, but I just thought of a life. Go ahead, Sorry. Oh no, no, no, you were on a roll, but I just thought of a question. So if you are working with a client, are you able to take them through this process? If it was you and I, being remote?

Anna Rahe:

Yes, in fact, there's a couple of different things. First is I have an entire studio online where we have every kind of video. Some of it's educational, some of it is movement therapy. We have the answer to physical therapy, and GST is called movement medicine, because physical therapy requires very different things, and so you can go and find a whole collection that is dedicated to knee health, hip health, spine health. You can also go in and be like okay, conscious conditioning, I don't have to hurt myself while I get the benefits of cardiovascular. How do we approach respiratory health is through the lung side rather than the heart side, and it doesn't put you in adrenal stress and over contract your muscular tissue. You will find things for aging.

Anna Rahe:

The Ageless Body is all about. How do you do three-dimensional movement to keep your brain wired, for good coordination, to avoid slipping and falling, and so you can find that online and do it completely studied, or? I teach classes every day. You can come and join our community of amazing people, men and women, who are just really like this. One class makes every other therapy I need go away. I deal with all my body stuff in one hour and I am just healthy and feeling good, so you can come and take classes. I see people privately. We have private, you know, curated stuff, but the idea is that this stuff is just something to learn. It's beautiful, it keeps you know. As we age, I notice that the people who are most fun for me as those who stay intellectually engaged and like my aunt's 72 and she's like teaching classes, I'm like this is so great for aging because you get to come in and learn and just really learn about you and anatomy and so you can do it. You can do it just like we're doing it. I talk you through it, I ask you if you're feeling things, I teach you a principle and then what you'll start to find is people who work with me.

Anna Rahe:

Fascia is a reflex. Okay, it's a way that your body wants to move and it's like a thirst reflex. It goes to the same area of your brain as eating and so you should have the impulse almost once an hour to move your body and fluff your fascia. Most people don't move enough, so that reflex is really muted. But when you start working with us and taking classes, you will have that microdosing experience where you're like, oh my gosh, I need to do this, this, this and I'm done and you move on and you feel the life force come in. It's like drinking a glass of water for your tissues and then you move on. And so it does kind of become a practice where you come and you learn and then you get to go away and live it and you'll be doing it on your own, which feels really good, where you're not like oh, now I have to set aside 30 minutes. What if you didn't have 30 minutes and you want to be with your grandkids? Yeah, just do it as you're living.

Michele Folan:

Yeah, I can see where you would want to integrate this into just, you know, while you're cooking dinner. You know you can.

Anna Rahe:

That's right traction off your counter, your sink. I usually talk people through this experience and, if you'd like, counter your sink, I usually talk people through this experience and, if you'd like, I can send you the videos for you to pod or post with your podcast release. We give like little videos that every day I show you how to just do three moves and I show you off your kitchen sink, off the tailgate of your car, off your right, because these three movements can be done anywhere in anywhere. I will send that to you.

Michele Folan:

I would love that. Yeah, I would love to share that with people, because my audience is very curious and they are also wanting better for themselves is why I love this community of women, because we're not done yet and we've got 20, 30 years ahead of us, maybe 40. That's right. And so why do we want to settle for the status quo? Why should we settle for aches pains, for that thing that's been nagging us and no one can ever tell us what it is right? We want to get answers, and a lot of the times, the answers start with us and going out and finding someone that can help us make it make sense. And so, yeah, I love that. I love that. One other question is love that I love that. One other question is what new research is emerging

Anna Rahe:

Yeah, what I'm sharing with you is pretty much the cutting edge, which is fascia is a fluid and it needs very different things. And while therapies I am a big fan of therapies and I still do body work on people and we have manual aspects, but the truth is is that fascia needs quite a bit of load, quite a bit of force and quite a bit of repetition in order to cellularly remodel. Okay, the remodeling doesn't come from the fiber side, it comes from the fluid side. So when your fascia is squeezed like a sponge, when water moves through the fibers, it activates the cells that are needed for good restoration and remodeling of our tissues. And so, all of a sudden, hydration in the tissues and movement steps up in terms of importance of how is your fascia laying down month after month? How are you actively reconstructing your knee?

Anna Rahe:

And with most therapies, even though they can be helpful in terms of monitoring and kind of like what's the word that is very explaining, my blood sugar just dropped when you have to, management, it's good for management, but for most women, I think they want solutions, not management. And so go get a massage because it feels good, but science is saying that it's really important that you move and live in your body differently. Okay, yeah, that's it. Because the cells are constantly restoring and how they restore is up to you, not up to a therapist. Nobody can massage you enough. You can't afford a massage therapist enough to actually influence the actual remodeling process.

Anna Rahe:

Maybe the condition it can loosen it, it can give temporary hydration, but if most people at 50 have some fascial damage by 50. But if most people at 50 have some fascial damage by 50. And so the point comes in to I need a sustainable solution for longevity, and the only one I know is changing how you move, and that means that you have to learn something about movement right. Most people have been so atrophied in their movement or have had done so much bad movement junk moves that they need to relearn what would organically be available to them right. And when they do that, then the body can restore on its own.

Michele Folan:

I love it. That's very well said. I feel like we all just got a pep talk. I think so.

Anna Rahe:

It's my belief. I mean, I'm breathing, I have a two-year-old and I'm 46 years old, turning 47 next month, and I'm like I have to age well. I have to age well because I want to be there, I want to be the young mom in an old woman's body, right, and I think that it's really interesting how much our aches and pains deplete our life force. It's really interesting how much our aches and pains deplete our life force. It's depressing, it's hard and arduous to move a body that's constantly griping at you, and so one of the greatest ways to feel young is to get rid of your pain and your aches where it's not consuming a thought in your process all the time. Can I get down on the floor with my grandbaby, or could I carry my kid up the stairs because my knees hurt Right, and so it's just.

Anna Rahe:

I think people should be inspired by the fact that we're living longer, so live better. Who wants to live to 90 if you can't get up, if you can't get down, if you can't spin around? So that's what inspires me. I'm moving on in my life. I'm not 30 and trying to look great anymore. I'm, you know. I'm moving on in my life. I'm not 30 and trying to look great anymore. I'm really wanting to feel great.

Michele Folan:

Yeah, I got off the phone with a client right before you and I started recording and she said yeah, you know, I, I, I will be having grandchildren here at some point. And she said, michelle, you know, I want to be able to get up off the floor, and you know, not that we're setting the bar low, that I just want to be able to get up off the floor. But that's that's kind of it in a nutshell. That's a bare minimum.

Anna Rahe:

Yeah, that's right, and it's sad that that is that the bar is so low. Right, you should be like. I want to do backflips, yeah, but no, we're just at the baseline of. We need to be able to primal squat Women especially have to primal squat for the health of your pelvis, for the health of your digestive system and we can't, we cannot get to the floor because we've flatlined our spine from sitting so much. So, yeah, I think that you're right. We're not saying that's the, that's not the bar we want to have, but that tends to be a goal because it's unavailable and it seems so basic. Yeah, right.

Michele Folan:

Absolutely All right. This is kind of a personal question. Yeah. What is one of your own core pillars of self-care? What do you do for yourself every day? I do.

Anna Rahe:

GST every day. You do every day. It's more like because it happened to me. It's kind of weird to say it's an activity, but it's actually my sacred ritual. I go inside and I listen and I feel and it's like my sanctuary and I respond to the tensions that show up and I put them into motion and I let them clear my mind and I become more of a vessel. I'm available when I don't have my static of pain and tension and restriction. I can become a woman of service, which I think feels good to most women. And when it's healthily done it's so important. It's giving life, it's life-giving rather than life-taking, if we can do it right. And so I think that it's not so much a selfish thing I don't go get massages and stuff. It's like it's this meet me where I am and have this time to help myself.

Anna Rahe:

First, Eleanor Roosevelt was the first one I heard as a quote saying she was interviewed by this newspaper article guy and they're like so how is it being the wife of the president? And how you know, do you just give him everything? And she said something like no, no, I just take care of myself, because if I don't take care of myself, I'm no good for my husband. And she said something like no, no, I just take care of myself, because if I don't take care of myself I'm no good for my husband. And the interviewer's like, isn't that a little selfish? I mean, you are the first lady, isn't your job to support your husband? And she's like no, so anyway, I think about that a lot of like. My highest goal is to be of service to my family, to the people around me, and that requires that I handle my burdens first. And if I have a way to lighten it and to create space, then I don't feel so burdened. I feel alive and welcome for it, open for love.

Michele Folan:

We cannot pour from an empty cup, right? That's so true.

Anna Rahe:

I love that. That's beautifully said, yeah.

Michele Folan:

Anna Rahe, where can the listeners find you?

Anna Rahe:

Come and see me at GSTbody. com GSTbody and that launches you off. You can find our Instagram. I have two different channels, one that's kind of for bodies and one that's for life, application and health and stuff and write me. I actually respond to all my emails. Personally, I really love to talk with people and connect through the body and the journey, so come and find me and I love working with all types of people.

Michele Folan:

Wonderful Anna Rahe. Thank you for being here.

Anna Rahe:

Thank you for hosting me. It's been a pleasure. I love what you're doing.

Michele Folan:

Thank you, hey. Thanks for tuning in. Please rate and review the show where you listen to the podcast. And did you know that asking for a friend is available now to listen on youtube? You can subscribe to the podcast there as well. Your support is appreciated and it helps others find the show. Thank you, there as well. Your support is appreciated and it helps others find the show. Thank you.