Tensegrity: What Does it Mean for Your Training?

The concept of tensegrity has been around since the 1960s. Buckminster Fuller was one of the ideas founding fathers, and he related this engineering concept to the body in order to understand how it supports itself. For years, a lot of academic courses studied anatomy in a more traditional way, isolated into parts, and without any great emphasis on how all those are all linked. That was until the Bio tensegrity model became more widely adopted. It gives us a much better understanding of fascial slings and force transmission in the body, and is something we consider as a huge part of training.

So What is Tensegrity?

Tensegrity is a combination of the words tension and integrity. This refers to muscle tension that supports the skeleton and holds the body together, and the integration between all of these muscles across the whole body. This means that our skeleton is supported by a network of continuous tension that is, or should be, evenly spread out over the whole body, supported by muscles and fascia. It’s what makes the body both stable and flexible at the same time.

Training to Improve Tensegrity

Stability training, strength training and mobility training shouldn’t be done separately, but instead simultaneously. In reality, none of these things happen separately when we run, sprint, or even walk, so why would we train them separately? Exercise done in a way that only trains one aspect at a time, fails to prepare the body for the demands it would face in real life. Where things like weight transfer, rotation and stretching and shortening of muscles  is all happening at the same time.

Having good tensegrity is what gives your movement a “bounce” to it. If you lack that “bounce” or elastic recoil when you move,  and instead feel heavy when you walk or run… this is likely because there is a lack of tensegrity. At Functional Patterns Dublin we offer a solution to this problem: We train in a way that covers all of these things at the same time, meaning strength, stability and mobility can be attained all at once. By focusing on a balance between these 3 components of movement, we enable a distribution of tension all the way through the body, down to the level of the bone, maximizing the results we can get with our training.