Klaus Eder on Fascial Fitness

Klaus Eder is a physiotherapist and has worked for many years with top athletes and Olympians who practice many different kinds of sport, such as the German national football team and the German Davis Cup tennis team. He runs a practice in Donaustauf/Germany for physiotherapy and remedial gymnastics and an affiliated rehabilitation clinic called Eden Reha for sports and accident injuries. Eden Reha also offers ongoing training for physicians, health professionals, and physical education teachers, covering topics such as sports physiotherapy and fascia therapy.

The invitation to write a foreword to a book about my favorite subject, fascia, is simply too tempting to pass up. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to support a book written by my colleague and close friend Dr. Robert Schleip, whose work I admire and very much appreciate and who shares my fascination with fascia.

The results of his research work, accompanied by his involvement in physiotherapy, have enabled him to make fascia an important part of science, as well as for sport physiotherapists, and in manual therapy techniques. I can’t tell you how excited I am that he now brings this knowledge to a wide range of readers in this easy-to-understand book.

My life as a physiotherapist working with athletes spans several decades. Since 1988 I have been working with the German national football team, and in this role I have been able to treat the players during seven world championships. From 1990 until 2012, I was also fortunate to work with the German Davis Cup tennis team as their physiotherapist.

I diagnose and treat athletes by using just my bare hands, and I get to know the consistency of most of the athletes’ muscles and fascia intimately. Similarly, I know only too well about the dramatic personal challenges players face when they have to retire temporarily or permanently as a result of injury or overused muscles. I am certain that fascial tissue is always affected. In most cases, I am able to reduce the severity of the pain and reduce the time that the athletes are absent from their chosen sports.

What helps me the most under these circumstances is my knowledge of fascial anatomy and the experience as a physiotherapist that I have been able to gain over many years. However, the way other therapists and I practiced in this field was for a long time based more on intuition and experience than on sound knowledge.

The fundamental change came as a result of the work of Dr. Robert Schleip. With their experiments, he and his colleagues at the University of Ulm have added a whole new basis to the understanding of fascia. They showed that fascia can harden the muscles independently and that this can also happen in connection with stress.

As a manual therapist, I can locate such hardening with my hands and fingers when examining athletes and patients; however, I often had to hold back with explanations, as I did not have any—I only had my senses. When talking to orthopedic surgeons and medical authorities, I quickly realized that they had very definite opinions about the origin of these lumps, and these opinions did not fit in with my intuition as a practitioner. Those discussions proved to be far from easy.

I am therefore very pleased that Robert Schleip received the prestigious Vladimir Janda Award for Musculoskeletal Medicine in 2006 for his experimental work, especially since I completed an apprenticeship with Janda himself. Prof Vladimir Janda, the renowned scientist and neurophysiologist from Prague, was one of the first who pointed out to me, and to other pioneers in today’s sports physiotherapy, how important the fascia is for healthy body movement how well it responds to treatment. This fact stands out and can be observed not only with my top athletes but also with those at amateur level who we have examined and treated for many years at our Eden Reha treatment center in Donaustauf in Southern Germany.

I especially welcome that with this book a fascia oriented training becomes accessible to anyone, whether professional or amateur athletes, and that the function of the fascia in the body is explained in an understandable way. This specific fascial fitness training, which Robert Schleip and his colleagues have developed in recent years, has a very high potential in my view.

It would make me very happy if this book could help more people have fun and success when exercising, without getting hurt or having to rely on therapeutic help from other knowledgeable fascia colleagues and me. Better still, this doesn’t mean that we as sports physiotherapists will be made redundant, but thanks to the work of researchers like Robert Schleip, our work will become easier in the future.

Klaus Eder

Donaustauf, August 2014