CrossFit South County

Are you sore, are your joints not doing so well?

Foam Rolling?

A decade ago strength and conditioning coaches, athletic trainers, and physical therapists would have looked quizzically at a thirty six inch long round piece of foam and wondered "What is that for?". Today nearly every athletic training room and most strength conditioning facilities contain an array of foam rollers in different lengths and consistencies.

What happened? A major change in the attitude toward injury prevention and treatment has been evidenced by a huge increase in the awareness that hands on techniques like massage, Muscle Activation (MAT), and Active Release Therapy (ART) can work wonders for injured athletes. We appear to be moving away from the eighties injury care mode of isokinetics and electronics to a more European inspired process that focuses on hands-on soft tissue care. The success of physical therapists with soft tissue mobilization (the physical therapy term for massage) and MAT, and a number of chiropractors with ART has clearly put the focus back on the muscle. The message at the elite level is "if you want to get better (healthier) get a good manual therapist in your corner".

What does all this have to do with foam rollers you might ask? Well. Foam rollers are the poor mans massage therapist, soft tissue work for the masses. As strength and conditioning coaches and personal trainers watched elite level athletes tout their success and improvement from various soft tissue techniques the obvious question arose. How can I mass-produce "massage" or soft tissue work for large groups of athletes at a reasonable cost? Enter the foam roller. Physical Therapist Mike Clark is credited by many, the author included, with the initial exposure of the athletic and physical therapy communities to the foam roller and to what he termed "self myofascial release". Self myofascial release is simply another technical term for self-massage. In one of Clarke's early manuals published as a pre-cursor to his book Integrated Training for the New Millenium Clark included a few photos of self-myofascial release techniques using a foam roller. The technique illustrated was simple and nearly self-explanatory. Get a foam roller and use your bodyweight to apply pressure to sore spots. Kind of a self-accupresssure technique. I believe these photos began a trend that is now probably a multi-million dollar business in the manufacture and sale of these simple tools.


When to Roll

Coaches and therapists are not in universal agreement over when to roll, how often to roll, or how long to roll so only general guidelines can be provided.

Rolling can provide great benefit both before and after a workout. Foam rolling prior to a workout can help to decrease muscle density and allow for better warm-up. Rolling after a workout may help to aid in recovery from strenuous exercise. The nice thing about using the foam roller is that it appears it can be done on a daily basis. In fact, Clair and Amber Davies in the The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook actually recommend trigger point work up to 12 times a day in situations of acute pain.

How long an athlete or client rolls is also individual. In a personal training setting we allow 5-10 minutes for soft tissue work at the beginning of the session prior to warm-up. With our athletic clients we do the same.

Originally printed in Training and Conditioning Magazine December 2006