Last week, I  wrote about the negative effects on driving when over-stressing one area of the body. Now what happens after the entire body has been stressed?

Another thinking has emerged, using the tensegrity model, that your body’s fascia plays a large role in determining your posture and structure. Fascia is the connective tissue that makes up nearly 60% of the muscle. It also encases and suspends the muscles and bones of the body.

Fascia is plastic in nature, which means that it cannot change its structure quickly like muscles that contract and relax – rather it adapts and grows around the structures and strains placed on the body.

So what does that means in terms of racing?

In short, your body remembers what it’s been through. Fascia remembers trauma. So if you receive whiplash in a car crash, your fascia learns to hold the rotations in your body where the seatbelt held you in place assuming that nothing was done to treat the fascia early on to erase the effects of the trauma.

That crash in Turn 1? Your body remembers that. Those jarring bumps down the back straightaway? The body remembers those too.

That trauma causes the body to re-align itself, and can make it more difficult to move fluidly without proper treatment.It doesn’t just come from large accidents either. Small bumps and jars, the body remembers all of those impacts and is constantly realigning itself.

Those past stresses and strains can make it harder to perform minute actions in the car, from turning your head properly to a quick blip of the throttle. In order to reduce the amount of future stress of the body, it’s recommended that drivers incorporate recovery exercises in their training regime that aid in body re-integration and hydration, such as MELT workouts with a soft foam roller.

The results will allow you to move more easily with less strain, and we already know the benefits of that from a previous post. You just found more free laptime! I should start charging for these things.

Editor’s Note: I want to thank Nikki-Naab Levy to ask for some information on how the physical body system works and more assistance collaborating on this post. Thanks,Nikki!  Check out her site –  MeltSeattle.com