Spiral Syllabus by Karen Kirkness

25/02/2026

We are in the next era of fascia research. The HA era.
💦 + ⚡️
The research has inherited a great deal from the cosmetic and pharma industries…and with that powerhouse of funding comes a darker truth.

Highly funded marketing departments have learned to spin numbers to sell more serum. Playing on anxieties…

The myth that HA binds 1000 times its weight in water belongs to that world.

But strip back the hype and see that HA is even more incredible, providing “fascia” (in all its elusive glory) with fluidic gliding for the free movement life depends on.

HA and hydration happen before the nervous system even fires. This is a pre-neural phenomenon. It means we have a huge opportunity to train the biochemical cocktail that sets up experience before we consciously register anything at all.

The gel matrix does not cling to water in a simple binary way. It loves water so much it gives it away. It creates a field of ionic influence across tissues, shaping the conditions in which sensation and movement emerge.

Sodium, potassium, magnesium are more than minerals. They sculpt excitability, signaling, and readiness at the cellular level.

Movement educators: Keep talking about HA, but change this one thing. Stop repeating the 1000 times claim. Start talking about hydration as ecology, not intake…

Crunchy vegetables, juicy fruits, mineral rich broths and micro movement are your tools. They deliver fluid and electrolytes in a way that primes tissue for load, glide, and coordination.

Gentle flow, breath work, and pro-glide micro mobilizations enhance circulation and pre neural readiness. This is the post-polyvagal, polyelectrolytic era of movement education, owing much to the work of 💦

Drop IONIC in the comments to get the link to a blog post with the references you need to get fully steeped in the literature. If you teach movement and align with fascia, you will want this information. ℹ️

16/02/2026

Roxanna brings something 🤫 quietly powerful to the mat: lived experience. And two screws in each of her feet 👣

With a body that expresses hypermobility, she knows.

But that experience isn’t what defines her; alongside episodes of injury, pain, pregnancy, motherhood, and three challenging years of Long Covid… she knows firsthand that no body is simply “strong” or “flexible,” “stiff” or “bendy.”

We are all a composite. As a twin, Roxanna has another level of insight on that score.

She’s raised this multiple times in our group work, the idea that the body is a mosaic of mobility and restriction. Capacity and constraint…

…and we love how she weaves this interplay into her approach to working around the mat in mandala flow.

The difference is not whether we have limitations (of course we do), it’s how we experience them.

Her hypermobility hasn’t made her reckless; it has made her perceptive. She has acknowledged it has sharpened her ability to see the subtle needs of her clients.

To recognise when reaching needs containment. When expansion needs grounding (we see the 5F so clearly in her cues here).

When strength needs softness.

Long before joining the Five Filaments pathway, Roxanna was already exploring the power of rotation in her group classes… intuitively sensing its role in resilience, adaptability, and everyday function.

Now, she weaves that rotational intelligence together with her extensive Vinyasa training, pelvic floor specialism, and ongoing advanced anatomy studies.

With 28 years of personal practice and 12 years of teaching, Roxanna carries a voracious thirst for progression. Not performance, but understanding and the constant drive to translate complicated jargon into language she can use to help her community, support her clients, and stay real.

That curiosity lives in her home studio in northwest Edinburgh, where she teaches creative, spiral-based, functional movement for everyday life.

Delighted to have Roxanna’s expertise on faculty this year 🫶🏽 Get in touch to join the 200-Hr starting in March 2026

15/02/2026

Let's get this clear: we have all been saying that HA holds (or binds, traps, absorbs, can absorb, etc.) 1000 times its weight in water.

The number sounds impressive, Joanne Avison and I got to talking about how such impressive stats are often just. not. true.

In this case, the truth is extraordinarily different. So much so, we have found it to be the learning opportunity of the year so far: HA chemically binds closer to *twice* its own weight in water.

Two times its weight is still a huge amount for a molecule to hold!

The rest of the story is as monumental as it sounds; it's the difference between twice and 1k times. That's a lot of difference.

Nerding out on how this exaggeration became common led us to a much deeper understanding, and that felt important to share... especially the question of what actually happens to the remaining 998 grams (99.8%) of water.

So here is a different picture ⟡

Imagine HA not as a sponge, but as a vast orchard tree in winter.

The trunk and branches are the molecule itself. On those branches, only a few small lanterns are firmly clipped on.

Those lanterns represent the water that is truly chemically bound (ie, trapped, absorbed, held, insert any of the verb phrasing we see in the modern HA literature).

There are only a couple of them (lanterns, the water molecules in this analogy) for every unit of HA. They are attached directly and will not readily detach.

Now imagine a thick morning fog settling into the entire shape of the tree. The fog fills every gap between branches. It occupies the canopy.

It wraps the silhouette of the tree(s).

That fog is not clipped onto anything, not glued to the bark. It is simply held in place because the branching architecture gives it somewhere to gather.

Out of what we call 1000 times its weight in water, only about 2 parts are the lanterns actually clipped onto the branches. That is about 0.2 percent.

The remaining 99.8 percent is the fog occupying the space created by the branching structure.

In a laboratory, in the test tube context, you could shake much of that fog loose.

In living tissue, though, there is no single tree standing alone. There is a whole forest ∞ collagen fibers, proteoglycans, cells, woven fascial planes & interfaces.

The fog is not chemically attached to each trunk, nor is it free sky. It is shaped by the *architecture of the entire forest*.

This is where things become fascinating for fascia practitioners ⟢

That so-called spare 998 grams of water, in the body, ***can't*** be bulk water at all.

Near hydrophilic biological surfaces, water tends to organize itself into more ordered layers. Hello and respectful nod to Professor Gerald Pollack. Here, water behaves more like a soft atmospheric field than random droplets.

It becomes structured, influenced, and *patterned* by the surfaces around it.

So HA does not act like a superabsorbent towel, holding a thousand times its weight by chemical force.

The cosmetics marketing department was spinning the truth super hard there, and my aim is to get fascia research back to primary sources:

Laurent, Comper, Balazs, and Cowman (the OGs of HA) were describing how an HA coil in dilute solution occupies a volume containing ~1000× its mass of solvent. Almost all of that is just water within the excluded volume of the polymer, the “fog in the tree,” not water chemically glued to HA.

You'll find these references in this blog post if you care to go deeper into the forest.

Because HA functions more like a branching form that provides water with a place to assemble. The architecture creates the condition... the water follows the form.

For us, the shift from repeating the headline number to understanding the underlying architecture has been a small but meaningful recalibration.

NOT to betray or belittle anyone, just to set the alignment back to primary sources.

Telling the story of how we may have fallen for the spin is a way back to the forest... a deeper look into that fascial forest and into the fog that gathers within it ✺

Go deeper here:

That famous claim about hyaluronic acid (HA) binding 1,000 times its weight in water? Sorry to be the burster of bubbles here. Sure, HA is a water-binding superstar, but that specific "1,000×" number? That's mostly marketing magic from the cosmetics and materials marketing world, not actual science...

13/02/2026

The Scapulohumeral rhythm is one of the pillars of coupled motion that defines the Five Filaments. It sounds technical but it is beautifully simple.

When you raise your arm, the humerus moves toward your ear and as it elevates its fascial flow tugs on the scapula saying come with me ↑ so the shoulder blade upwardly rotates in response.

It is called a rhythm because it is dependable, a 1 → 2 cascade of spiral motion shaped over hundreds of millions of years as quadrupeds slowly stood upright and began to reach higher.

As we rose, we wanted more. More sky. More expression. More brachiation… not just swinging through the trees, but reaching for the stars.

Flexion demands increased, so the humerus learned to externally rotate as it lifted, the bones gliding across fascial planes in a subtle corkscrew ~~~ stimulating synovial exchange and hydrating the interface so nothing would grind.

The scapula learned to posteriorly tilt and rotate so the acromion would clear space. The thorax had to expand and yield.

Not stretch. Nothing is being pulled long like elastic or chewing gum. It is phase shifting, spiral sequencing, load sharing through living helices.

When the rhythm is intact, arm ↑ scapula follows ↑ ribs breathe ↑ HA circulates ↑ and motion feels buoyant. When the rhythm is lost, we chase length, crank into range, flare ribs, shrug shoulders, and call it tight.

But the body is not asking for more stretch. It is asking for better timing, better rotation, better glide.

The Five Filaments are not muscles but directional spirals of tension/flow that coordinate this choreography.

Balance them and the shoulder flies. Disrupt them and the grind begins. Spiral restores rhythm. Rhythm restores glide. Glide restores flight. 🪽

Image modified from Spiral Bound: Integrated Anatomy for Yoga by , photo of in Gomukhāsana by with kind permission and thanks to

02/02/2026

So proud of my French collaborator 🇫🇷✨ Quelle joie!

Watching Célina Hwang - Formation de Yoga, Pilates et Biointegrityoga having such beautiful success with the Five Filaments in France honestly fills my heart. This video was filmed at Māyāshala Yoga Paris, by Journaliste Florine Constant. It’s a real pleasure to see this work translated so clearly + generously into practice.

The 5F is a rotational motion rubric I developed after years of struggling with the limits of traditional cueing language (external rotation, flexion/extension, pronation/supination, etc.). I kept noticing universal patterns in how rotation pairs with flexion and extension...and as a teacher, I wanted something far less technical and far more intuitive. That’s where ideas like the opening spiral and grounding spiral emerged, eventually becoming the full Five Filaments (5F) framework.

Célina came to me very early on as a co-developer of the movement syllabus. She was already teaching this material naturally in her own work, and the 5F gave us a shared umbrella — and a shared aha! — as we realised many teachers were already living this intelligence in their bodies and simply looking for the science to support it.

While I’ve been deep in the research side (writing, publishing, and nerding out on fascia, molecular dynamics, and embodied neuroplasticity) Célina has been bringing the work to the people. I couldn’t be more proud to see this method expressed by such a world-class mover and deeply committed educator.

And mon dieu(!) hearing it all spoken in French? Magnifique. 💛🌀https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBD1FYQZ7vY Reportage de l’émission Bel et Bien Ensemble - France TV - Novembre 2025
Journaliste Florine Constant

Reportage de l’émission Bel et Bien Ensemble - France TV - Novembre 2025Journaliste Florine Constant

30/01/2026

POV: movement besties in midlife who love strength *and* sanity 💅🧠

You’re informed. You lift your body weight. You know hypertrophy and resistance training matter too, especially as we move through midlife.

And also… movers, besties, we got you:

You know you can’t be maxing out on a torn meniscus, or shredding dropbacks/handstands with wrist tendinopathy.

You know pull-ups aren’t the vibe with an inflamed cuff or frozen shoulder.

But most of us aren’t walking around with clean diagnoses. We’re living with the unnamed stuff.

The ni**le. The stickiness. The “this doesn’t feel free yet” stuck kind of icky-stickitis.

And your intuition keeps whispering:

👉 More glide first. Coax the range. Let it move.

So how do we balance the constant need to “lube things up” with the other big shouty voice screaming GET STRONG, LIFT HEAVY?

Besties: your intuition is backed by the science.

Mechanobiology and motor-control research agree on this one:

*How you load* (movement quality) matters just as much as how much you load. And the order priority is clear.

Your fascia (connective tissue) adapts on time, not brute force.

Your cells care about signal quality, not just intensity.

Your nervous system tightens everything up when movement feels uncertain; and that costs energy and amplifies strain.

Which means:
✨ Micromovement is non-negotiable.
✨ Glide is not optional fluff.
✨ ROM work isn’t anti-strength (!) …it sets the very conditions that enable it.

Strength without glide concentrates stress and distributes it chaotically across the unprepared system = chronic pain.

So no, this isn’t “don’t lift heavy.”

This is *glide before gains* 〰️
Keep the micromovement, bestie. Restore the freedom.

Then load the system that’s ready to receive it.

Your tissues are listening to the music of your movement, and all they want to do is dance, dance, dance. 🧠🧬 Let them!

28/01/2026

Did you know that once you complete the first third of the Advanced Yoga Teacher Training (300-Hr) with us, you qualify as a Five Filaments Specialist?

These clips are from the Autumn in-person Intensive weekends, where trainees begin their journey into Spiral Vinyasa with

In these intimate weekend gatherings, we explore hands-on adjustments, sound spirality and chanting + intelligent sequencing that can be applied immediately in real class/workshop settings.

This 300-Hour programme is truly unlike any other, grounded in the paramount role of rotational dynamics in the body and their reflection in the wider patterns of Nature.

Find out all the details and Apply 🆓 when you pop “300” in the comments. Places limited to 12 max capacity for optimal connection.

Accredited by Yoga Alliance, the training allows 200-Hour graduates from any YA-approved school to combine certificates and progress toward ERYT-500, setting themselves apart in an increasingly crowded teaching landscape.

The in-person weekends, held in the Tweed Valley, Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 at ✨ form the foundation of the year-long journey to graduation, with continued training and assignments delivered online.

We are especially proud of this flagship cohort with , and the 5F specialists starting their journey in French language with 🪷 A new era for movement that feeds rather than forces.

Don’t forget you can drop 300 in the comments to get your link straight to your DMs. ⬇️

26/01/2026

There’s no linear value sequence here.
Structure matters. Full stop.
Lean muscle is major in midlife. Collagen erosion should be shored up.

And we know only too well the crucial importance of estrogen in tissue maintenance.

This carousel was put together on work by women who have a lot to say about the potential advantages of collagen supplementation and HRT (that’s a whole other post).

But here’s the point we’re making today:
Structure doesn’t maintain itself in isolation.

If tissue can’t flex, glide, and hydrate, it stops stimulating the very HA-producing dynamics that keep it adaptable.

When HA drops, hydration dries up.

When hydration drops, range collapses.

When range collapses, structure no longer gets the signals it needs to stay organised, robust, plumped and primed for staying strong 💪🏼

So the loop breaks.

At that point, adding more “structure” (powders, protocols, replacement materials ) has diminishing returns, because the *conditions that let structure stay usable* aren’t in place.

This isn’t an argument against collagen or hormones.

Rather, it’s a call for understanding the environment they’re meant to work in.

Structure builds shape.
Hydration keeps it usable.
Ion flow keeps the internal conversation going.

No hierarchy, no magic dust.
Just systems doing what systems do.
More on collagen + estrogen in this context (spirality, tissue glide) coming soon.

For now, tend to your inner aquarium 🐠