I am sure many of you have seen a cylinder piece of foam in your local gym, or perhaps a half foam roller with one side flat and the other side rounded. You may have seen someone doing some crazy movements on one and thought, “That looks crazy and awkward.” Well it may look a little crazy, and in the beginning, it may be a little awkward and painful, but I can tell you from personal experience that it does do its job. Foam rolling is a concept that utilizes your own body weight to “massage away” restrictions caused by joint stiffness and muscle tightness. I put “massage away” in quotes because it is not like any massage you have ever had, and it is definitely not the nice relaxing massage. I will just include all the concepts and some tips for you, and at the bottom of the page I have a link to a site that has lots of pictures of actual techniques to use.

A foam roller can be used in multiple ways, and can help improve flexibility, function, performance, and can help reduce injuries. Although it takes a little more work on your part than a sports massage, it is much less expensive and shows similar benefits. If you are looking to improve mobility and range of motion, reduce scar tissue and adhesions, decrease overactive muscles, improve quality of movement, or even just fill in gaps between hands on sessions and deep tissue massages, this could be what you are looking for.

Properly using the foam roller will result in all the benefits of traditional stretching, and will also break down soft tissue adhesions and scar tissue. By using your own body weight in certain positions on the foam roller, you can perform myofascial release, break up trigger points, and relax tight fascia, all while increasing blood flow and circulation of soft tissue. So what does that all mean?

A little background to help you know exactly what is going on. Fascia are thin tissues that cover all the organs of the body, including every muscle and every fiber within each muscle. A myofascial unit includes the muscle and the fascia that covers that particular muscle and its muscle fibers. Hopefully you aren’t lost quite yet. Due to various reasons, including disuse, lack of stretching, and injury the fascia and underlying muscle may become tight and stuck together. This is known as a muscular adhesion and leads to restricted muscle movement. It causes pain, soreness, and reduces flexibility and overall range of motion. We often notice this type of adhesion when it forms what we call a knot or trigger point.

Here’s a little more to get you even more confused. All forms of stretching stretch the myofascial unit (muscle, fibers, and fascia). When muscle fibers are injured (could be an actual injury, from weight lifting, or from repetition in your daily life such as sitting at a computer all day), the fibers and the fascia become short and tight. This uneven stress can then radiate through the fascia to other parts of the body, causing pain and other symptoms. Myofascial release helps to release this uneven tightness. Everything in your body is an integrated functional unit, meaning if one segment is not functioning efficiently, then the other components must compensate. This leads to tissue overload, fatigue, faulty movement patterns, and initiates a cumulative injury cycle.

There are some other things that I will just briefly explain only because they are very important as to why this concept works. These include things like muscle spindles and golgi tendon organs (GTO). In a nutshell, muscle spindles are responsible for changes in muscle fiber length and the rate of that change, so that knee jerk reflex that you get when a doctor taps you on the knee is a perfect example of your muscle spindles at work (result in a change in muscle length). GTOs are responsible not for muscle fiber length, but for the amount of tension put on that muscle. They are what inhibit muscle activity if too much tension is generated. This is a protective mechanism our body has developed to help reduce injury when lifting too much weight, so theoretically you will drop something instead of tearing a muscle (not always, but that is the purpose of these GTOs). This is the main concept behind foam rolling. Basically, if you push on a tender spot, and move around on that spot, the muscle length changes constantly, forcing the muscle spindles to shorten and tighten, which can cause more pain. If you push on a tender spot, and just hold constant pressure, the GTOs can force the muscle spindles to relax, and this decrease in tension helps to decrease pain, improve function, and help bring a normal length-tension relationship to that muscle.