Ashley Black
Ashley Black was born in a small town in Alabama in 1973. At a young age she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis (JRA), which would come in waves of debilitating pain throughout her childhood. She spent her youth in and out of doctor’s offices and was told she would need a wheelchair by age 25. Determined this would not be her fate, she developed and enacted intuitive therapies to control her flare-ups and learned that physical activity, stretching, and strength were effective means of pain management.
She developed a love for sports and became a competitive athlete – tumbling, dancing, and cheering throughout college and eventually stopped using all the medications she had been taking throughout childhood. By her early twenties, she was by most accounts “cured,” and was at the peak of her physical performance, teaching 20+ aerobics and fitness classes a week.
Life as she knew it came to a screeching halt in her mid-twenties after the birth of her second child when she went into the hospital for a routine procedure and contracted a deadly staph infection that only 7% survive. After months of excruciating pain, Black was released from the hospital with a prognosis of a life of disability and pain management drugs.
Refusing to accept her fate yet again, she decided to take her health trajectory into her own hands so she could raise her two small children and get her life back. Black began studying every form of medicine and researching both the known and unexplored facets of human anatomy to find something that could help her – and her motivation intensified after the birth of her third child just two years later.
Using herself as a guinea pig, she discovered that the structural limitations in her body were due to constrictions in the “sheets” of connective tissue – fascia – that connect, penetrate, envelope, and surround every organ, joint, muscle, and system of the body. Utilizing her background in engineering and her education as a fitness instructor, Black developed a fusion of manual tissue therapy, internal stretching, body mechanics, and core activation techniques to bring a holistic approach to wellness, sports performance, and recovery. Her unique insights contributed to the creation of a new realm of science: Fasciology™ – the study of fascia.
Because her methods were so effective, Black began working with local track athletes to improve their sports performance and overall body function. Her techniques soon caught the attention of Olympic and professional athletes, celebrities, models and actors who came to rely on Black to treat their injuries in order to win a playoff season, walk the runway, or film a major production.
Although Black owned sports therapy clinics and had hired and trained hundreds of practitioners in various Fasciology™ techniques, the number of people she could personally treat would always be limited and she wanted to help as many people as possible; ultimately educating the masses about fascia. It became clear that she also needed a tool that would not only allow her to more quickly and effectively access the muscles and joints beneath the layers of fascia, but also so her clients could self-treat between sessions to keep their pain at bay. She invented the FasciaBlaster® and handed it out to her mostly male pro athletes and high-level clients, who passed it on to their friends and families.
Black discovered another extraordinary side benefit of the FasciaBlaster® when the girlfriend of one of her MLB clients called to say, “that stick got rid of my cellulite!” Although medical experts agree that cellulite is fat pushing up through the webbed fascia (like a pillow pushed up against a chain link fence), until the invention of the FasciaBlaster®, the health, medical, and beauty industries were not focused on addressing the fascia. She conducted third party studies on women of various ages and body types, documenting amazing 30 and 60-day results from using the FasciaBlaster®.
Black took the FasciaBlaster to market in March of 2015 and her following exploded as users began experiencing life-changing results in aesthetics, pain management, and overall health and started spreading the word. She started a private Facebook group in February 2016 that has organically grown to be one of the largest women’s only groups on that platform with more than 330,000 members. In the group, women can see real time results and testimonies from other users while receiving education and support from Black and her team about posture, proper alignment, “cellulite” and fascia. The group has become a community of support and encouragement for women as they transform their health and learn to love their bodies. Their thirst for knowledge about fascia inspired Black to write her #1 national best-selling book, The Cellulite Myth (It’s Not Fat, It’s Fascia!) published in February 2017.
“My mission,” says Black, “is to help others like me, and I think people have been looking in the wrong places for years. There’s a reason we’ve been able to create such a passionate movement so quickly: it’s the right time, it’s the right place and it’s the right technology. My life’s purpose is to make sure that the knowledge of fascia spreads to everyone, and I’ll be damned if I don’t share this gift for the rest of my life.”
