There are very few martial artists who, at one stage or another, haven’t flirted with foam rollers. I have one myself.
I have seen people at the gym contorting themselves over them, always with serious, if not pained, expressions on their faces.
There is a specific exercise with the roller, that always causes me to raise an eyebrow, supposed to target the adductor (inside of the thigh). This involves straddling1 the roller and rubbing it up and down – a bit like a horizontal version of Jamie Lee Curtis and John Travolta doing their aerobic routine in the 1985 movie ‘Perfect’. (No, I am not going to supply a link).
But is it actually doing anything?
The answer to that is ‘yes’ and ‘no’.
Experts are cagey on the subject; they say it’s okay as part of an intelligent warm-up routine that includes all the other good stuff. They don’t go as far as saying that anything positive that comes out of it may just be a placebo, but do hint that we might be kidding ourselves.
Targeting fascia and trigger points.
There has been a lot of magical stuff talked about fascia. For those who don’t know; it has been described as like a wetsuit under the skin that covers the muscles as a kind of sheath. If you skin a piece of raw meat, it’s that semi-transparent, very thin, ‘skin under the skin,’ the stuff that you feel inclined to trim off.
But, to use a foam roller to distort the fascia is a fruitless enterprise, because any limited success you might have snaps back to position very quickly (similar to muscles after massage, no real permanent change happens).
People talk about working with the fascia in an isolated mechanical way; physiologist scratch their heads at such ideas. To them it doesn’t make sense.
(All the experts who have recently been selling their souls to the idea of fascia have now moved on. Currently the big thing is tensegrity – look it up).
Tensegrity models explain how all parts are interconnected.
Similar controversies about trigger points.
To try and find some release from a frozen shoulder condition I experimented with manipulating the myofascial trigger points associated with the problem, and did experience some success. But, whatever happened to me, the experts really struggle to recognise these points as being nothing more than a minor neural glitch.
Trigger points associated with frozen shoulder.
When people talk about massaging the fascia or the trigger points then, really, they are fooling themselves.
Pain and the production of endorphins are entirely different things.
There is something going on with foam rollers and pain.
Massaging hard with a foam roller can be a very painful process (that particular exercise that rolls hard on the Iliotibial band is a real killer). Experiments have shown that these pain-inducing manoeuvres with the roller trigger a kind of pain acknowledgement within the body, causing a defensive analgesic process to kick in, all supported by a rush of endorphins; a kind of natural high the body produces.
The interesting bit is that this pain defence doesn’t just affect the specific point, it floods the whole body. So, you might be foam rollering your left calf, but your right calf gets the same pain release, even if you haven’t touched it with the roller.
Similar things happen with sports massage. If a physio works hard to loosen off (temporarily) your left hamstring and succeeds in a partial release, weirdly the right hamstring is also released to the same degree without the physio even laying hands on it. Bizarre isn’t it.
To round it off.
The conclusions I have come to are that the benefits of the foam rollers are actually quite slim. However, there is something in the idea of methods of self-massage (I have no problems reaching for a tennis ball to get at those annoyingly unreachable areas). Also, the therapeutic and well-being delights of a full massage cannot be understated.
Ideas - additional uses for a foam roller:
· With the right fitting pot, it would make a decorative holder for indoor plants.
· A series strung together would make a great obstacle feature for ferret racing event.
Some people swear that thrashing their bare skin with stinging nettles is good for them. If it works for you, go for it.
I just wanted an excuse to use the word ‘straddling’.