Seventy3, Manchester (2026)

21/10/2026

In a recent post, I said you’re not waiting for a number to catch up with you.

You’re inside a reaction and fascia responds to what you do with it.

Here’s the part I left out:
A reaction needs ingredients. And timing matters.

Training provides the signal that tells your tissue it needs to adapt.

Collagen provides amino acids, the raw materials used to build new collagen. Vitamin C is an essential cofactor in that process.

So what happens when those materials are available before the signal arrives?

In one study, taking collagen with vitamin C an hour before exercise roughly doubled a blood marker associated with new collagen synthesis.

The protocol:
10–15g collagen 50–100mg vitamin C 30–60 minutes before training

But this is the part most people miss:
The ingredients aren’t the instruction.
The load is.

Without loading, there’s no meaningful signal telling the tissue it needs to adapt. The supplement simply makes sure the raw materials are available when that signal arrives.

The load gives the instruction. The ingredients give the tissue something to build with.

No load, no build.
Supplement or not.

Save this for your next session.

16/10/2026

Your fascia doesn’t age on a clock. It ages on chemistry, and chemistry answers to what you do.

Everyone talks about tissue stiffening with age like it’s a countdown. It isn’t. It’s a reaction, and it has a name.

Sugar in your blood attaches to collagen and bridges one fibre to the next. Cross links. A few of them and nothing changes. Enough of them and the sheet stops sliding on itself, because fibres that used to move past each other are now tied together.

And stiff isn’t strong. People hear stiff and think solid, sturdy, resilient. It’s the opposite. A sheet that can’t lengthen and can’t glide doesn’t absorb load, it passes it on. Usually to a joint, a tendon, or the one part of you that already hurts.

Here’s the part that usually gets left out, because it sounds like bad news. You won’t undo the old collagen. The collagen at the core of a tendon is laid down early in life and barely replaced after that. Whatever chemistry has happened to it has mostly happened.

But that core isn’t what decides how your tissue behaves. Around those fibres sits everything else.

Water. The slippery layer the sheets glide on.
The cells that rebuild the matrix. That part renews constantly, and your input is the signal telling it to.

Leave tissue still and it thickens. Move it, Load it and the rebuild is better, healthier.

Which is the whole point. You’re not waiting for a number to catch up with you. You’re inside a reaction, and it answers to what you do with it.

15/10/2026

925 kilos for a 1% change in fascia…

So is fascia work a waste of time?

Far from it.
It’s simply not doing the thing it says on the tin.

Two things are actually happening.

One. Fascia is roughly two thirds water. Press an area and fluidmoves out of it, let go and it comes back. Leave tissue still for long enough and the fluid between its layers thickens, and the
layers stop sliding on each other. Moving fluid through is what thins it. The layers glide, and a touchy area settles.

Two. Fascia is far more densely nerved than the muscle underneath it. Across your low back, roughly three times. Press on it and
large nerve fibres fire, and at the spinal cord they crowd out pain traffic coming the other way.

Neither of those is remodelling tissue. Both of them are real.

Fascia work is great. It just works differently to how you have been told.

13/10/2026

The ache two days after a hard session probably isn’t your muscle.

It has a name that tells you where it is assumed to come from, and the assumption looks wrong.

Here’s how that was tested…

One leg was taken through eccentric exercise until it was sore. The other leg was left alone.

Then a painful solution was injected into two tissues separately: the exercised muscle itself, and the fascia lying over it.

Injecting the exercised muscle hurt no more than injecting the leg that had done nothing at all.
Injecting the fascia over it hurt a great deal more.
Testing the two separately is the part that matters.

A method that cannot tell them apart will always find the muscle, because the muscle is what everybody is looking at, and it is the only thing most people know is down there.

It fits with something else that is measured and almost never mentioned.

The deep fascia over your back carries roughly three times the nerve supply of the muscle underneath it. The tissue most people picture as packing material is one of the best wired in the body, and it is the layer that gets sensitised.

12/10/2026

You did the two minutes. Nothing happened.

You weren’t failing to stick at it.
You were given half the instruction.

The claim comes from a real trial, and it is a good one. 198 generally healthy adults at a screen for most of the working day, with neck and shoulder pain on 186 days of the previous year. Average age 43, and 174 of them women.

Three groups, ten weeks. Two minutes a day, twelve minutes a day, or a weekly email about general health.
Two minutes took away 1.3 points of pain. Twelve minutes took away 1.8. Six times the work, about a third more relief.

Which tells you the duration was never the active ingredient. The two minutes were a single set of lateral raises, taken until another repetition was not happening, and that is the part that gets dropped every time the claim is passed on.

Two minutes of comfortable is a different thing wearing the same number. It means the thing to change isn’t scheduled time in your diary. It’s effort within the time.

Same exercise, same two minutes, enough resistance that the last repetitions are genuinely difficult.

Hard is the target. Sharp pain is not, and if that is what you get, this is the wrong fix for it.

11/10/2026

The scan is clean. The surgeon is happy. It still hurts at the end of every session.

Here is the part almost nobody explains beforehand. To reach a disc, a surgeon doesn’t just go to the disc. Skin, fat, the big sheet of connective tissue across your lower back and the small muscles either side of your spine are all divided at the midline and held apart by a retractor for the length of the procedure.

Those muscles shrink afterwards. Atrophy and fatty infiltration of the paraspinals after discectomy is one of the better-documented findings in spinal surgery, and it doesn’t reverse on its own.
So the disc got fixed, and the way in never did.

There’s a tell, and it’s the question nobody asks you. Damage hurts from the first rep and gets worse with weight. If yours is fine at the start and gives up near the end, that isn’t damage. It’s a system that’s run out.
Which is the good news, because an unfinished job is something somebody can finish.

Hands-on work brings the sensitivity down and gets the area moving again. That buys a window where the tissue will take load it would’ve refused an hour earlier. The load is what changes what those cells build. Neither one does the other’s job, which is why doing only one of them has never held.

And it’s slower than you’ve been told. Muscle answers in weeks, connective tissue answers in months, and almost every programme that failed you was stopped just as it was getting started.

If you’ve had back surgery and you’re still not right, this one is for you.

10/10/2026

You didn’t lengthen anything.

This is the premise under every flexibility programme ever sold: hold it long enough, often enough, and the tissue gets longer. Somebody checked.

Weppler and Magnusson went through the research across many separate designs, the single-session studies and the three to eight week programmes. They measured both things.

Fibre length: unchanged. Stretch tolerance: up. Stiffness falls a little. What moves is the point you’re willing to stop at, not the hamstring.

Which is not nothing. A nervous system that lets you go further is a changed nervous system, and it’s why you can get into a position today that hurt last month.
It just isn’t a longer hamstring, and the difference matters when you’re deciding what to spend your time on.

The commercial incentive in the stretching world runs hard the other way, and the finding survived anyway. Separate research groups, separate designs, all pointing the same direction, with one explanation that covers the whole pattern.

So stretch if you like it. Plenty of people do and it feels good. Just stop expecting it to change the tissue, and stop being told that it has.

What changes connective tissue is slow progressive load, over months. A different activity, on a different timescale.

You got braver. Not longer.

09/10/2026

Everyone calls it a knot.

The sore spot is real. Researchers put a needle into active ones in living people and sampled the fluid: acidic, pH 4.7, and full of the chemicals that make nerve endings hurt. Something is genuinely wrong in there.

The knot is the part that isn’t. The most recent look, ultrasound and histology together on the upper trapezius, found no contracted muscle at all. What it found was muscle that had thinned, and fat where muscle used to be.

And it may not be the muscle doing the hurting. The sheet of fascia over it carries around three times the nerve supply, and when healthy volunteers were given the same irritant in each tissue in turn, the fascial one hurt more.

Between those collagen sheets sits a thin layer that lets them glide. When it thickens, they stop. That’s densification. It’s still a hypothesis with imaging behind it rather than a proven cause of pain, and it’s the most credible account anyone has for why something feels stuck.

Fascia-focused work brings the discomfort down and gets the area moving. Load is what lets you maintain it and progress it, so the change holds.

Pressing it harder was never the answer.

08/10/2026

Pain that keeps coming back usually behaves in one of four ways.

Some gets worse the moment you load it. Some feels fine at the time, then punishes you the next day. Some has no pattern you can see at all. And some settles completely, then turns up three months later somewhere else.

Those aren’t four injuries. They’re four ways a body answers the load it’s under, and what helps is different for each one.

Swipe for the table.

06/06/2026

As solo clinicians we’ve been forced to accept all the extra work is just “part of the job.”

In reality it’s an endless list of extra jobs that have been done the same way for years by systems not designed for how we work.

Treat the client.

Write the notes.

Send the exercises.

Follow up.

Request the review.

Learn Zapier.

Build the automations.

Manage the diary.

Answer enquiries.

Chase old clients.

Update Zapier.

Learn Email marketing.

Update Mailchimp.

Learn another platform.

And somehow still be fully present with the person in front of you.

At some point we stopped questioning it.

We just adapted to broken systems.

The irony is, most of us didn’t get into this profession because we wanted to become administrators.

We became clinicians because we wanted to help people.

The technology exists now to remove a lot of that friction.

To let you stay present during treatment while the admin happens in the background.

Not to replace clinician but to give us our more time and more bandwidth so we can give our all to our clients.

That’s the idea behind Seventy3 OS.

Not another tool.

A simpler way of running a clinic.
A better way of running a clinic.

Waitlist now open
30 founding members
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Seventy3

21/10/2026

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