Most yoga teachers learn anatomy one muscle at a time — hamstrings, glutes, lats, each treated as its own separate unit. That's how anatomy is taught in most 200-hour trainings, and it's not wrong. But it's incomplete. The body doesn't move through isolated muscles alone. Muscles, fascia, joints, and the nervous system work together, with connective-tissue continuities helping transmit force between regions.
This is the foundation of fascia yoga: sequencing with an awareness of how the body is connected, not just which individual muscles a pose targets.
What fascia actually is
Fascia is the connective tissue that wraps every muscle, organ, and bone in the body: a continuous web rather than a series of separate wrappers. Where classical anatomy teaches muscles as isolated units with individual origins and insertions, fascia research shows those muscles are functionally linked through this webbing, transmitting force and tension across much longer distances than any single muscle could on its own.
This isn't a new idea in bodywork — massage therapists, osteopaths, and structural integration practitioners have worked with fascia for decades. What's newer is applying it directly to how a yoga class gets built.
Anatomy Trains: a map for fascia yoga
One well-known framework for exploring these connections is Thomas Myers' Anatomy Trains — a system that groups the body's fascia into major connected pathways, called myofascial meridians, each one running through multiple muscles and joints. Research supports structural continuity in several of these proposed pathways, particularly the Superficial Back Line and the functional lines, though the evidence is not equally strong for every line, and their functional significance is still being studied. Rather than asking "which muscle does this pose stretch," Anatomy Trains asks "which line does this pose lengthen or compress, and what else is connected along that line."
A practical example: the Superficial Back Line runs from the soles of the feet, up through the calves and hamstrings, along the spine, to the top of the skull. Forward folds can create tension and lengthening sensations across several parts of this pathway — not only through the hamstrings, but potentially through the calves, spinal tissues, and soles of the feet. Backbends and active poses such as Locust generally shorten or load parts of the posterior pathway. What feels like isolated hamstring restriction may sometimes be influenced by other areas along the pathway, including the calves, plantar tissues, spinal tissues, and structures near the base of the skull.
Once you can see a class this way, sequencing decisions start to make more sense as a whole, rather than as a list of poses targeting separate body parts.
Why this matters for sequencing, not just anatomy
Understanding fascia yoga doesn't mean rewriting how you teach. It means adding a second lens to the sequencing decisions you're already making:
- If a class is building toward a deep forward fold, are the poses before it actually preparing the Superficial Back Line as a whole — feet, calves, hamstrings, spine — or just stretching the backs of the legs in isolation?
- If you're building toward a twist, which spiral lines are you actually engaging, and does the sequence before it prepare that full pathway?
- Where in the class does a fascial line get lengthened, and where does it get actively loaded or strengthened? Including both mobility and active loading can help a class feel more balanced than repeatedly emphasizing passive lengthening alone.
This is less about memorizing every line and more about developing a habit: seeing the body as connected pathways rather than isolated targets.
Seeing it, not just reading about it
This is genuinely hard to hold in your head from a book. Several interconnected lines, each running through multiple joints, each showing up differently depending on the pose — it's a lot to visualize on the fly while building a class.
That's why SomaAxis includes an interactive Anatomy Trains map as part of the platform, open for any teacher to explore. Tap into any of the seven major myofascial lines included in SomaAxis — Superficial Back Line, Superficial Front Line, Lateral Line, Spiral Line, Deep Front Line, Back Functional Line, and Front Functional Line — and see it mapped across the body, front and back, along with which poses in the library engage that specific line, separated into poses where the line is the primary focus, and poses where it plays a secondary role.
It's built as a reference to sit alongside your sequencing, not a replacement for understanding the material. We think about it the same way across the rest of the SomaAxis Framework.
Anatomy Trains is a conceptual framework developed by Thomas Myers. Research supports several proposed myofascial continuities, although their functional significance continues to be studied.
Bring it into your next sequence
Once you've spent a little time with the fascia lines, try applying it directly: pick one myofascial meridian, and build a sequence that moves through it deliberately — lengthening it in one phase of the class, then working to tone and stabilize it in another.