This Recover Week post will focus back on an Active Recovery technique that we introduced on the blog and discussed in episode 3 of Fuel. Move. Recover.: a performance and wellness podcast. Those previous posts go great with this week’s post and corresponding episode 19 of the FMR show.
One way to work on your mobility and muscle quality is to use a foam roller! The term “foam rolling” is the common way to describe self-myofascial release, which is just a fancy way of saying you’re loosening up how muscles slide back and forth. Foam rolling can feel like you are giving yourself a massage, which means some parts of your muscles can be very tender.
The tenderness from foam rolling can come from several things.
Physically smashing the muscle between the roller and the muscle’s bone
The sensitivity of your skin and structures, like muscles, to touch and pressure.
Tense muscles from hyperactive nerves that keep those muscles overly tense and stiff.
Applying pressure to knots (aka, trigger points ) in the muscle.
1. Addressing general soreness
First, the general soreness is from squishing your muscles between the roller and the bone(s). Squeezing the muscles like this creates pressure on the muscles, which starts to change the tension in the muscle itself. Muscles get sore from exercise and competition or even repeated positions like sitting at your desk all day. Those sore muscles might compromise your movement patterns and place excessive tension on the muscles themselves and the neighboring joints.
Muscles can be stiff for lots of reasons that I’m not going to detail here (you’re welcome to ask a question about it for us to discuss on the podcast though!). This stiffness can impair your proprioception, range-of-motion, or overall performance. While it doesn’t seem like you can make long-term improvements in your stiffness just from foam rolling, there are immediate improvements that can occur from foam rolling.
2. Addressing sensitivity to touch and pressure.
Second, your skin and the underlying muscles are very adaptable to touch and pressure. Think about how you put a wool sweater on and it’s itchy at first but after a few minutes, the itchiness goes away? Do you have a friend who can’t walk outside because it hurts her feet but you walk outside barefooted all the time? Or vice versa. Well, these are examples of how our skin and muscles are sensitive to touch and pressure. Foam rolling is something that highlights this sensitivity. Frequent “exposure” to foam rolling via the pressure of your muscles against the roller will gradually decrease your sensitivity to it.
The only source I have seen that gives a timeline of this is this great book from Jay Dicharry, MPT, a colleague in the physical therapy profession. In the book, he says that a two-week window of consistent use is needed to resolve the initial sensitivity to the activity of rolling itself. The desensitization to the touch and pressure of foam rolling, like most things we talk about, might take more or fewer days for some people. My experience from teaching people how to foam roll supports this 14-ish day window for getting acclimated to it.
Why is foam rolling still feel tender for those of us that have been rolling for more than two weeks?
3. Addressing hyperactive muscles
Third, the nerves that control the activation of your muscles (aka, neural drive) can become asymmetrical. Foam rolling seems to be able to calm these overactive neuromuscular units via the reverse mechanism. Here, we use pressure between the foam roller and the muscles to decrease the tension in the muscles (just like we discussed in #1). This in turn can calm down the nerves that can downregulate the tension in the muscles themselves.
4. Addressing isolated dysfunction
Lastly, working on the knots or restrictions in the soft tissues in and around muscles can influence the following:
How you feel by release some of the tenderness/pain caused by the knots
How you move by improving how the muscles contract and relax with fewer knots.
Restrictions form for a number of different reasons: one reason is the overuse of the muscles. If you sit in at a desk all day for work or school, some muscles might get stiff. For this, we can utilize the foam roller for that benefit in temporarily changing the stiffness like we talked about above. Then you can get up and move around or lift weights like I have the high schoolers do when I coach them immediately after school. Our use of the rollers pre-workout is to improve the balance of all the muscles before the workout starts so we can reinforce proper posture and movement during the workout itself.
When and how to do it
The last thing we should talk about is when to foam roll, technique, and frequency of foam rolling.
You could, and probably should, foam roll every day.
Most exercises or home activities take concentration and focus to perform correctly. You need to “be present” and pay attention to your mechanics to ensure you are doing it right. Unfortunately, this is necessary for success and thus, you have to sacrifice time to focus on it. Learning how to use the foam roller is not different.
However, once you learn how to foam roll you can do without having to focus so much!
That means you can use the foam roller while watching tv with your friends or family. You can do it while having a conversation. You can do it while waiting for the coffee to brew or water to boil! So while foam rolling isn’t going to cure a musculoskeletal ailment, there are a lot of benefits you can gain with little effort.
Finally, you should spend about 60-90 seconds per muscle group. I usually teach my clients to do 10-20 rolls, which usually takes that amount of time. Obviously, you can do it for longer or shorter durations but it seems this a sweet-spot for the body segment (muscles, skin, connective tissue, nerves, etc) to acclimate and become desensitized to the pressure. Application of pressure by the roller on the muscle has to be long enough for the muscle to relax and decrease neural tension to the area you are trying to “loosen” up.
Here is a video about foam rolling we put together with the owner, Mike Mercer, of Canton Barbell where Advancing Athletics is also available for performance training and rehabilitation. This is an all-inclusive guide to hitting all the major muscles when foam rolling.
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