I am hoping for an interview with this extraordinary man, whose prophetic voice 20 years ago (well before I wrote Anatomy Trains) was judged too radical and ignored, only to be brought back for this conference by the FRC organizer, Peter Huijing, who now recognizes how important Jaap’s work is.
Jaap did dissections way back then with new eyes and realized that the pictures in the anatomy books were 1) impossible, and 2) what the anatomists wanted to find. Recognizing way back then that muscles do not attach to bones, he dissected fasciae in way to show how the muscle fibers attach into the septa that eventually attach to bone, but that the ligaments are linked in series with the muscles.
We have long thought that muscles provide an outer, contractile force and (in eccentric) resistance to force, but that ligaments were local to the joint and acted passively and only at the extreme end of range of motion.
While there are a few true ligaments that act in this way; the cruciate ligaments, imbedded within the knee capsule, really joint bone without being in series with a muscle, but most of the rest, including the sacrotuberous (familiar to most readers as part of the Superficial Back Line), pubofemoral, and the epicondylar ligaments are in series with the muscles, and therefore can be engaged in any position of the joint (which makes much more sense).
At the other end of the muscle is the sliding tendon (n the case of the forearm or leg muscles, say) and the link into the periosteum of the distal bone, sometimes including other ligaments.
The point being – and here’s the revolutionary thought – that almost every muscle is set up as what van der Wal calls a ‘dynament’: a ligamentous strip, then a muscle, then another ligamentous strip, i.e. fascia-muscle-fasia. All the hamstrings are obviously set up this way: long strip of fascia, intervening muscle, long strip of fascia. This needs a diagram and expansion, so stay tuned for the references, but this is major and will change our thinking about how the body works and thus how to treat it when it doesn’t.
Van der Wal’s other major discovery is that there is no fundamental difference between muscle and fascial receptors: spindles, GTO’s, specialized endings and free nerve endings are all fundamentally fascial stretch receptors – just being stuck into differing types of fascia for different types of readings. That simplifies things, but I am not as sure of this conclusion yet. But the ‘dynament’ concept is radical, sensible, and sure-footed.