A valuable pieces of advice for Self-Myofascial Release From Tom Myers
He is the author of Anatomy Trains if you don’t know.
Check one of the most professional explanations in full here.
Some excerpts:
For starters, you cannot foam roll fascia exclusively; all the other cells – nerve, muscle, and epithelia – are getting ‘rolled’ too.
In epithelial and muscle tissues, the water is squeezed out of the tissues, and then is sucked back in when the pressure moves on or is taken away. Like squeezing a sponge over the sink and then letting it fill again while doing the pots and pans, this is generally a good idea. As the old bedouin proverb has it: “Water still: poison! Water moving: life!”
It’s not going to make the muscle stronger, but there is initial evidence that it might make the arteries to them more elastic.
If we turn to the nerves’ reaction, rolling can certainly be ‘sensationful’. This is a negative if it is so painful it causes muscle contraction and cellular retraction, so I am not a fan of painful rolling. I prefer my clients stay in the pleasurable realm, or on the ‘hedonic point’ (poised between pleasure and pain).
Rolling through pain, however, can be helpful on previously traumatized areas – for instance, rolling over an old bone break – but we want the area to be pain-free when we’re done, not bruised or further traumatized. Bruising in general is, in my opinion, almost always a sign of tissue damage, not of healing. Moving slowly over the tool is very important in a painful area.
…you can also use rolling to awaken areas of ‘sensori-motor amnesia’ – to bring sensation into places that you (or the client) are not moving in daily life…
…iliotibial band (ITB) is not a place of sensori-motor amnesia…
…the most likely areas to be ‘amnesiac’ are hard to find and hard to roll – like the whole adductor quadrant on the inside of the thigh, and obscure and tiny (but important) areas in the deep lateral rotators on the backof the hip, or right under your head in the upper neck…
To put this into practice, instead of rolling the gluteals and the easily available part of the ITB, try using the roller or tool just under the edge of the iliac crest (its distal or inferior edge, right at the top of the gluteals). Work the tool under the edge of the bone, and roll down, away from the bone, for 1/2” to 1” (2-3cm). Work your way along the whole edge doing this, from the anterior to the posterior spine (ASIS to PSIS). This area, often missed in both bodywork and SMR, will produce new results, new sensations, new hydration.
Or at the other end of the ITB, get the working surface of the roller on the outside of the knee, just between the end of the ITB on the tibial condyle and the head of the fibula. Work slow into this area, rotating the leg in small movements over the roller. This can help free the fibular head to be responsive to your rotational movements in sport, especially in sports where you plant your foot and twist like tennis or football.
Every time I go to the gym, there’s someone on a mat in the corner, rolling out their iliotibial band, up and down, with a grimace of pain. This practice, to put it gently, has limited value.
Big heavy sheets of fascia – the iliotibial band, the thoracolumbar fascia, the plantar fascia – cannot be ‘lengthened’ through foam rolling, so please don’t say that to your clients or even think it for yourself. A foam-rolled foot can feel better and more alive and have reduced inflammation maybe (often only temporarily), but if walking on it thousands of steps a day hasn’t lengthened it, a few swipes on a foam roller ain’t gonna do it either. You can increase hydration, increase sensation, and maybe ‘melt’ some of the fascial bonding on the edges to give it more movement freedom, but the pressure required to get a significant change on overall length would send the client screaming – rightfully – for the door. This is math, not opinion.
Takeaway:
- Foam-rolling shouldn’t be so much painful (for the most part)
- Roll slowly
- Roll the places of sensori-motor amnesia (they are usually hard to find and simulate, though)
- Be careful with ITB
- Try work the area between tibial condyle and the head of the fibula
