Stop Rolling Things
For whatever reason, runners seem to think that rolling things is the cure for everything. What they never come to realize is that they must roll to feel better and if they don’t they can’t function. If this sounds like you, maybe its time to rethink your “treatment”. In this blog we’ll look at what rolling does, what it doesn’t do and how we can better treat aches and pains. While foam rolling is mentioned most, this goes for lacrosse balls, frozen water bottles and anything else we may aggressively press against our tissues.
What Does Rolling Do?
Besides feeling terrible in the moment it likely works through a pain-inhibits-pain pathway with the brain to feel good based on a comparison from not foam rolling. For example, let’s say at rest, your IT band is a 5/10 pain but when you foam roll it the discomfort shoots to an 8/10. All of a sudden that 5/10 feels more like a 2/10 when compared to the 8. While this makes your pain better it hasn’t solved anything. It hasn’t improved your tissues ability handle force. It hasn’t adjusted your training to better suit your current abilities. It hasn’t adjusted your running mechanics to decrease compression at painful areas. In the grand scheme it hasn’t done really anything to make you a stronger and better moving human.
Additionally, we see that foam rolling can have slight improvements in range of motion without a decrease in muscle performance. This is important because static stretching is shown to decrease both of them. However, as runners, we need to ask ourselves if stiffness in our muscles is a bad thing? Nope. We actually benefit from muscle stiffness as it improves our running economy through energy storage. There are a time and a place for stretching, it’s just not very often.
What Rolling Doesn’t Do?
After seeing little it does do you could guess that this section will be fairly extensive. And you’d be right. To keep it short and concise we’ll focus on the main things that people think it does do.
Does it lengthen facia? No. Fascia is extremely thick and strong, and we would all be very very tall if all it took to make us longer rolling over it. The IT band which is one of the most common spots to foam roll is shown In cadaver studies that it takes over 2,000 pounds of force to change the IT band 1%. This is tissue that has been dead for an extended amount of time and is still so incredibly strong you’d have pull a full sized car across your leg to get the desired effect. Now imagine how strong alive, healthy and active tissue is? Obviously a foam roller is nowhere near able to exert that much force.
Secondly, does it break up adhesions? Also no. What does adhesions even mean? I assume people are talking about the crunchy feeling around a tissue if you press on it really hard which again is just fascia and already stated is not changed.
Finally, does it get rid of trigger points? Again, no. What is a trigger point? It’s not very well defined. Some people talk about trigger-points as very sensitive spots in our tissues, while others talk about them as physical locations that are built into our tissues. Two very different things. Unfortunately for both parties we’ve yet to prove they even exist. In little kids we start to see sensitive tissues in the same spots as common “trigger points” that simply seem to develop as we grow. So, assuming they exist and seem to be a natural part of human development why do we need to get rid of them? They obviously serve some purpose or they wouldn’t have carried on throughout our evolution.
In the end, like most of the things I blog about the answer of whether or not to roll things out comes down to YOU! If YOU like to foam roll and feel that it benefits YOU then continue rolling. However, you must be doing some thing that we know is beneficial on top of that. Foam rolling is never the only thing we will do. We have to be incorporating some sort of stimulus that will actually lead to benefits, adaptability’s and resilience within our body. If after doing this you still have time and feel like mashing your tissues then be my guest and roll like the wind.
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This content is intended for patient education, not clinicians. If you would like references regarding the information provided, please email strideptco@gmail.com.