From performer to a Fascia Pioneer blazing the trail for her Tune Up Fitness Community, we are excited to shine a light on thought leader, author, and program creator, Jill Miller.
For over 30 years, Jill has been discovering and educating, making significant contributions to the fields of self care, fitness, and ways we can improve our physical and emotional resilience.
Interview led by Meg, Tune Up Fitness’s Brand Engagement Manager, with over 25 years of dance experience, starting in Dallas, Texas, and has now traveled the nation performing and teaching. After years of repetitive dance movements, Meg’s pain in her shoulders, hands, and feet was relieved by the Roll Model® Method. This new knowledge inspired Meg to complete more Tune Up Fitness courses; she continued to take Body By Breath and Yoga Tune Up® Teacher Certification to share it with her students and reawaken her love for anatomy.
From functional movement to embodied anatomy and beyond, Jill has transformed the way to approach recovery, precovery, and training for embodiment. She co-founded Tune Up Fitness Worldwide and created the self care fitness formats Yoga Tune Up® and The Roll Model® Method. She is the author of the internationally bestselling book The Roll Model: A Step by Step Guide to Erase Pain, Improve Mobility, and Live Better in Your Body and Body by Breath: The Science and Practice of Physical and Emotional Resilience. Jill is also a contributing author on the topic of self myofascial release in the medical textbook Fascia, Function and Medical Applications used in Universities across the globe. Her groundbreaking dedication to fascia has not only revolutionized self care routines, but has also contributed to clinical applications, advancing our understanding of fascia and how the body heals and functions.
Learn more about Jill and fascia in the Teacher Highlight Interview below.
Meg: What is fascia?
Jill Miller: Fascia is one of your body’s connective tissues. It stitches your entire body together from foot to face, cell to skin, and everything in between. The fascia is also living. It has loads of its own cells and even has hundreds of millions of nerve endings in it. Fascia is the tissue that interconnects your body to itself.
“Listening to my dad talk about the body, disease, and anatomy gave me great comfort and fueled my love of biology.”
Meg: When did you first learn about fascia?
Jill Miller: I first heard the term fascia from my dad, a medical doctor. I used to love listening to him do “callout” with other physicians, a process where a doctor who is finished with their rounds shares all patient info with the next doctor on duty. Listening to my dad talk about the body, disease, and anatomy gave me great comfort and fueled my love of biology. The first time I heard fascia described for movement and massage was from my longtime yoga and bodywork mentor, Glenn Black. I met him in 1992, and he shared his orthopedic medical massage style known as Bodytuning® with me.
Meg: What are the top three things to do for fascia health?
Jill Miller: Here are the top three things to do to keep your fascia healthy.
- Vary your position. Don’t stay stuck in the same shapes all day because your fascia will accommodate that, and it will grow stiffer in that shape. That means that when you try to do other things like walking if you’re sitting all day, your hips are going to be really stiff.
- Load your body. When you load your body, you tell your fascial tissues that they must also be strong and resilient. As our bodies age, it isn’t just bone that we lose; we also become more brittle in our connective tissue. So, loading our connective tissue really helps with overall muscle balance and bone density. So if you don’t load your tissues, especially as you age, they’re gonna become more brittle and more likely to tear.
- Support your fascial tissues with self myofascial release or self massage. When you roll your fascia tissues this helps de glue the areas that have become stiff from lack of movement or injury. This overall increases your range of motion, freedom of movement, and comfort in your body.
Meg: What is the most surprising fact that people don’t know about fascia?
Jill Miller: I think people are surprised to learn how many cells reside in fascia and how many cells traffic through fascia. The biological elements that comprise fascia are numerous! I get the sense that most people view fascia as a wrapping tissue that surrounds muscles and is relatively inert – but that is not the case at all. It is a verdant tissue that is ever changing, growing, shrinking, and remodeling, and it conveys an incalculable amount of sensory information to the brain. Your fascia is durable and enduring. Consider your body as an endlessly developing terrain that you discover, uncover, and recover with every breath you take.
Meg: What is a Deep Fascia massage, and how do I know if I am doing it?
Jill Miller: Your fascia is organized like a strata, almost like a lasagna. You’ve got the superficial layers on top, transitional layers, and loose fascia between. Then you have deep fascia. You also have fascia that’s interwoven within your muscles. When you use a ball or tool to target a deep fascia, you roll and glide through multiple layers of fascia to get to “the spot.”
Meg: Can you exclusively massage deep fascia?
Jill Miller: When you’re doing any type of rolling in order to get “the spot,” you’re also rolling across many other layers of fascia. So you’re probably targeting “the spot” anytime you’re going to go for something that’s deep in you, but know that you’re getting all these other layers at the same time. The best practice whenever you’re doing any type of rolling is to breathe, move slowly, and always listen to your body’s feedback. It doesn’t have to hurt to work, soft can be supreme in your touch, even if you’re trying to go deep.
Meg: I recently learned I have Plantar Fasciitis, how do I stretch my Plantar Fascia?
Jill Miller: The plantar fascia is one of the most famous fascias in the human body. It’s fame is because, at one point or another, many people have had an inflammation of it called plantar fasciitis. If you get plantar fasciitis, the best practice is to actually not stretch it or excessively massage it because that can create even more inflammation in the tissue. Best practice when you have plantar fasciitis is to actually strengthen the muscles that connect to this dense band of tissue on the foot rather than continue to stretch and irritate, as that can prolong that inflammatory cycle.
Meg: What fascia covers the fascicle, and how many layers of fascia are there?
Jill Miller: You have fascia covering and supporting every single layer of your muscle: these fascia layers are collectively called myofascia. In fact, every single muscle cell you have is wrapped in a layer of fascial tissue called the endomysium. When the endomysium and their muscle cells are collected together, they’re wrapped in yet another layer of fascia. This layer is called the perimysium. The perimysium comprises what’s known as the fascicle. When multiple fascicles come together, they’re wrapped in yet another layer of connective tissue and that’s called the epimysium. Endomysium, perimysium, and epimysium. These are the layers of fascia that are the myofascia within and around your muscles.
Meg: One piece of advice to professionals using hard tools?
Jill Miller: To professionals using hard tools for rolling, I’m here to tell you that hard tools are anathema to a therapeutic response. When you use a hard tool on your body, the muscle bracing response is your body’s way of kicking back at you.
When you dive into tissue with a hard ball, you feel pain, you feel tension. You feel your body’s own resistance. That is the central nervous system trying to protect you. It’s trying to create a guard so that a hard ball or tool can’t enter your body. So, the best practice is not to use hard tools. Use tools that are more compliant with your body tissue so that you’re not rolling against your own tension and creating a battle between the tool and the central nervous system. Use a tool that will conform to your form, a tool that helps you to have a therapeutic response that sets you up for true recovery.
Meg: What is your No. 1 tip for teachers?
Jill Miller: Be a pioneer of your own body and experience, never lose interest in being an endless explorer. Share that enthusiasm with your students and trust that what intrigues you can light a spark in them.
There’s a wealth of knowledge waiting to be discovered in the fascia world, and our tuneupfitness.com site is your gateway to it. We offer a plethora of articles that cover fascia and other offerings.
Do you have blazing questions about fascia and self care? We’re here to help. Please leave your queries in the comments below. There’s so much to learn about your own inner space, and we’re excited to explore it with you. Welcome to the fascinating world of fascia!
Learn more from Jill through her MOVE BREATHE ROLL online classes and trainings.
YouTube: Tune Up Fitness
Instagram : @thejillmiller
Facebook: Jill Miller
As someone who came from a strength training background before studying yoga, the importance of varying my position has been HUGE. I spent decades in primarily the saggital plane getting really good at what I did most of the time – and getting strong in some dysfunctional patterns until I was forced to address the pain.
Great information about fascia and the reason to not use hard tools.
Also nice to hear about your background and your dad.
I’m just imagining little Jill listening into her dad’s “callout” and she had no idea she’ll become such a huge influencer as a Fascia educator. I really respect and admire your passion in teaching, helping people to release their pain and regain the connection to their body. I am grateful for your life-long dedication to this field and sharing your wisdom with us. Thank you, Jill!! <3
The mention and idea of loading the body (and therefore fascia) was a great reminder. So often, I hear discourse regarding fascia limited to the context of release. Being reminded that release, while important, is just one piece of the “fascial puzzle”, and that “loading” the connective tissues is just as critical, is very refreshing.
Thank you for the interview, and thank you Jill for offering your words, which provide such clarity to describe fascia. I’ve read descriptions from Jill in different articles and books, and each offering touches on different aspects and different ways to explain it – thank you! I loved the succinct list of the 3 tips for maintaining /improving fascia health: move, load, and self-massage. Message received! I certainly do not load my body sufficiently in order to allow my fascia to stay strong and resilient, and help with muscle balance and bone density. Time for me to hold those yoga and YTU positions longer!
Fascia is such a complex connective tissue; it’s so pervasive in the human body and there are so many different kinds, that it’s a challenging subject for me to fully understand, so I really appreciated the explanation of the endo, peri, and epimyseum layers of fascia in muscles. As an active yet aging person, I have found that the YTU balls have been extremely effective way for me to target areas that feel tight and/or sore and restore my mobility.
Until I took the RMM, I had no idea of the importance of the facia in the human body. The RMM has been a godsend for my pain. Thank you, Ms. Miller!
As a former runner, I love what Jill says about NOT stretching the plantar fascia when you have plantar fasciitis. I have learned that what is causing the pain may actually be other muscles that need attention. Fine tuning our own proprioception is one of the keys to pain relief. I am in complete and total awe of the wealth of knowledge Jill shares while still being so very funny and lighthearted. I want to be Jill!
I love that you ask us teachers to stay curious, experience and explore. I recently came upon J. Guimberteaus videos on fascia and was absolutly speechless. I could see how fascia decides in the moment how it will split, connect reconnect and I realized every single motion we carry out in our lives is unique from the point of view of fascia, maybe not for the eye. Fascia takes me into philosophy….
I started my self-massage with hard, cork balls and I can confirm that softer ones are better. Although hard balls can also be used, for example, on the feet. However, you may experience a feeling of resistance in the fascia.
Wow, this is an excellent interview that helps to bust so many myths about the fascia. I enjoyed learning about the pervasive and ever evolving nature of the fascia. Its functionality is so much more than being a mere scaffolding holding our bones and organs together. I realize after reading this article, how important its to improve and maintain the health of our fascia through variety of movements, loading and myofascial release.
I love when Jill says this about fascia, “It is a verdant tissue that is ever changing, growing, shrinking, and remodeling, and it conveys an incalculable amount of sensory information to the brain. Your fascia is durable and enduring.” I find this to be so encouraging! Feeling stiff in the body can be so limiting but knowing that stiffness doesn’t have to be your reality forever because your tissues want to grow and change creates a ray of hope for those living in pain. When we give our fascia something new to consider and assimilate, we can create the change we want to feel in our bodies.
Fantastic Q & A! I really appreciate the top three tips for fascia health – changing positions, loading the body and supporting fascial tissues with SMFR.
Moving more, strength training, and rolling out truly form the trifecta for vibrant, resilient health.
Jill’s work helped me a lot to get deeper and more detailed into the world of fascia – her book “The Roll Model” is a brilliant navigator to explore my own “bww” – body wide web. I love rolling with the “No pain – more gain”- strategy and teach it to my clients and students.