Fascinated by Fascia
Dr. Edythe Heus and Her Passion for Muscles, Movement, and How Our Bodies Fit Together
“I may have to fix something in your ankle to fix your neck. That's what's so much fun — you get to be a detective.” — Dr. Edythe Heus
“Here,” Dr. Edythe Heus says as she hands me two long wooden poles. “Take these.”
Then she gestures at two wooden plates mounted on round wooden balls positioned a few feet apart and instructs me to stand on them. “Try and balance while holding onto the poles lightly,” she says. I’ve just been introduced to the wobble disc weight shift — and one of its masters.
Grasping the poles, I instinctively use them like hiking sticks as I attempt to maneuver myself onto the plates. Instantly, I fall off. After a few more attempts, I conclude that it’s all an illusion and I’m stepping onto a bed of giant marbles. Each time, I crumble onto the floor before I can get my footing.
As I fall again and again, Dr. Heus gazes at me attentively, her eyes piecing together an invisible puzzle. Her goal? To assess how well I can stabilize in an unstable situation. By learning how to fine tune my inner environment with my outer one, she says I’ll have better balance, decision-making abilities, quickness, and precision — which will (hopefully) improve my jiu-jitsu performance.
Dr. Heus has spent her life changing the way people move, and like the countless others who have had this same pair of eyes size up their physicality, scrutinize the health of their nervous systems by watching their feet, and stretch the limits of their capacity to move, I’m hooked. Dr. Heus is a detective of the body, and today I’m proud to be her case.
I met Dr. Heus through our mutual friend and longevity athlete, Steven Kotler, when I saw them working out at Gold’s Gym one early morning last September. I was intrigued, not just by the unusual workout they were doing — which involved an assortment of unconventional exercises emphasizing balance and instability — but by the petite, confident woman in her mid-sixties with so much fire in her eyes. Immediately, I knew I wanted to find out more about what drives her.
“I’ve spent a lifetime studying muscles and movement and how everything fits together,” she tells me during our interview. “It’s what drives me.”
Dr. Heus has followed that drive to help everyone from Olympians, action sports athletes, world-famous dancers, leading stuntpeople, and even Broadway musical stars feel and move better in their bodies. A chiropractor specializing in kinesiology, she is the founder of Rev6, a neurologically based exercise system designed to remodel the fascia and create new neural connections throughout the body.
But she was on fire about movement long before she knew what a fascia even was. She grew up in the Midwest, and, as a kid, spent a lot of time in church. “I just couldn’t sit still,” she says. “I was so curious. And what do you do as a small child when you’re bored and don’t have an iPad or a smartphone? You use your powers of observation.”
Dr. Heus used hers to watch how people moved. From a young age, the mechanics of human movement captured her imagination. She would spend hours noticing the subtleties in the gait and posture of people. Even as a child, she remembered, she had an innate ability to spot flaws or disturbances in the way people moved.
But it wasn’t just an academic interest. She also knew she wanted to help these people directly. The seeds of a lifelong calling to help people move better — and therefore feel and perform better — in their bodies were planted.
At first, Dr. Heus thought that the obvious way to do that would be by becoming a doctor. But in sixth grade, she passed out after watching blood gush out of an artery while watching a first aid film. She let go of that dream. Then, after chipping her front tooth at thirteen, she became intrigued by dentistry, and even went to pre-med for it. But when she interviewed dentists about their quality of life, she knew that didn’t feel right either.
She almost let the dream go, but then a friend suggested she go to chiropractic school. This was the seventies when the idea of a more holistic approach to health was becoming more popular, and chiropractic was booming in places like New York City. She wasn’t sure about it at first, but when she discovered an approach that relied on kinesiology and muscle testing, she knew she had found her path.
“There was a real respect and deliberateness for the human body,” she says, explaining that the field represented a way to take her lifelong powers of observation and put them into practice to pursue her purpose of helping people to feel better and perform better. It just clicked.
But school was just the start. She became increasingly mesmerized by what the body can do and how it can change. Her girlhood interest in the body stronger than ever, she was constantly learning, experimenting, and dreaming up new — and often unusual — techniques to address the issues her patients were having.
Fixing injuries or helping people improve their body mechanics is rarely straightforward, she says. But that’s what she loves about it.
“I may have to fix something in your ankle to fix your neck. That's what's so much fun because you get to be a detective. But the body guides you.” It’s not just their similar names — Dr. Heus is like Dr. House but for our physicality (minus his rudeness… she’s kind and patient!).
Early on, Dr. Heus became especially intrigued by feet.
“I remember realizing in my third month in practice that the quality of someone's life is directly related to the health of their feet,” she says. She soon made it her mission to figure out how to help people improve their foot health.
To try and understand what her patients were going through, she would run experiments on herself. One involved walking around department stores in a pair of shoes that were a size too small. She realized that the feet are often at the root of many common health issues from low energy to neck pain to back pain. She even believes feet health impacts our decision-making abilities.
Much of these issues, she assures me, can be avoided with two simple strategies: by making sure our shoes are long and wide enough — and by walking barefoot as often as we can.
Dr. Heus used her skills of observation and experimentation to help her patients feel and move better in their bodies, and within five years of opening her practice, was so busy she couldn’t take on new patients. But after having her son, Alexander, she and her husband decided to move to California to get away from the chaos of Manhattan and to start fresh with their new family. That’s when, almost by accident, she started working with athletes. Her first test case was with a decathlete, the grueling event that comprises ten track and field events completed over a two-day period. Soon, she also began working with the Padres, the San Diego-based baseball team.
I take a moment to take this in as she tells me her story, picturing the 5’3” pixie-haired woman in front of me taking a team of baseball players through her unconventional training methods — like the one I tried at her garage gym just outside of Los Angeles, California. I ask her if she had any pushback from the athletes when she first started.
“Yes,” she nods. “I was a petite woman in my forties training professional baseball players, and I couldn't throw a ball,” she says. “But that didn't mean that I didn't know movement. I mean, movement is movement.” I notice the determined look in her eyes.
Undeterred, Dr. Heus used her detective powers to help her athletes — and soon, they noticed big changes. They became less clumsy, developing better body awareness, or what’s called proprioception. Their decision-making abilities improved, and they were able to make quick decisions on the fly. They also became much more durable, most often avoiding injuries altogether. Or if they did tweak something, it never led to a full-fled injury. They even got more reliably into flow.
Word of mouth spread, and soon, she was working with athletes in fields including golf, volleyball, water polo, and track and field. She became their secret weapon. But when she was asked to train stuntmen specializing in free running and parkour, she wasn’t sure if she could help.
“They were doing all this risky stuff,” she says. “I thought, ‘How can I possibly help them?’” But, intrigued, she decided to take on the challenge. “The changes were unreal. They would tell me things like, ‘I'm more creative’ and ‘I don't even have to think about what I'm going to do before I do it.’”
Dr. Heus credits much of these improvements to the neurological changes taking place in the body as the fascia, the dense, fibrous connective tissue that surrounds muscles, bones, and organs, improves. She is aware of just how offbeat this style of training sounds.
“I was doing fascial and neurological training before there was a term for it. Just like I was doing functional medicine before there was a term for it,” she says. She is used to being questioned. But she is confident in her ability to make a difference in everyone’s life — from the everyday amateur to the elite athlete.
Dr. Heus uses her detective work not just on others’ bodies, but on her own as well. She surfs, paddle boards, cycles, and loves hiking. But out of everything, skiing lights her up the most.
“If I drop dead on a ski slope having the best ride of my life, that’s not a bad way to go,” she tells me, laughing. She also assures me that her skiing continues to improve year by year, crediting this to the health of her fascia — the healthier our fascia is, she tells me, the less energy expenditure we require to perform in our sport.
But at the deepest level, why does Dr. Heus do what she do? When I ask her, she lights up.
“Because I can help people change their lives and give them tools that will enhance the quality of their life for a lifetime.” The fire in her eyes comes through as clear as ever.
And in that is the lesson of Dr. Heus’s passion — being on fire serves you, but it also in so many cases ends up serving others. This aligns closely with the concept of ‘self-transcendence’ as described by my friend and humanistic psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman in his book Transcend. Kaufman suggests that transcending beyond our own interests and focusing on a greater purpose is what truly enables us to realize our fullest potential.
But these aren’t just words. It’s my reality by the end of our session together. Now I am not only able to balance on both wobbly discs (!), but also to shift my weight from one to the other. I feel like… a superhero. At her essence, Dr. Heus reminds us that we all are.
Takeaways
Here is one big thing I learned this week about passion, one exercise you can do to stoke your own inner fire, and one aspect of Dr. Heus’s intense enthusiasm that rubbed off on me — and that I now want to learn more about, too!
One Lesson: Embrace the Winding Path
Dr. Heus's path reveals the transformative power of embracing unexpected turns. Her initial aversion to blood led her away from traditional medicine, yet it was this very detour that brought her closer to her true calling in movement and kinesiology. This teaches us that our 'wrong turns' might actually be hidden signposts guiding us towards our authentic passions.
One Exercise: Conduct a Physical Energy Inventory
In the spirit of Dr. Heus’s holistic approach, conduct an energy inventory with a twist. Instead of just noting what activities energize or drain you, also observe how your body physically reacts to these activities. Do they increase tension or bring relaxation? This physical response is a powerful indicator of alignment with your inner passion, mirroring Dr. Heus’s focus on the body-mind connection.
One Curiosity: The Foot-Body Connection
Dr. Heus's insight on foot health goes beyond typical health and fitness advice. She links our foot health directly to our overall well-being, decision-making, and energy levels. From now on, I’m going to follow Dr. Heus’s beginning recommendation for healthy feet: to always make sure shoes are long enough (Dr. Heus recommends ¼ to ½ an inch distance from our toes to the top of our shoes) and to never squeeze into shoes that are too narrow.
Links
And All That Time You Thought You Were Just Playing in The New York Times
Yes! Dr. Heus is a pioneer when it comes to the practical connection between the body, nervous system and physical performance. Thank you for sharing your due diligence.
Thank you for expanding my experience with Dr. Heus genius. Your curiosity to explore it and the courage to apply it in your life.