Blog Archives
The Foam Roller Isn’t Doing What You Think It’s Doing
by Christopher Chilelli RTSm, MATm, Mechanics in Motion
The Foam Roller Isn’t Doing What You Think It’s Doing.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t doing anything.
If you’ve made to a gym or dance studio, oh, anytime in the past decade you’ve probably noticed a not insignificant number of people sitting on white plastic cylinders. Perhaps you’ve done it yourself. This practice is, of course, foam rollingand involves placing your body’s weight onto specially designed, usually plastic implements and slowly rolling over ‘knots’ and ‘tight’ areas in musculature. It has become pervasive in gyms and rehabilitation clinics recently, but has been a common practice for dancers for much longer. The fancy technical name for the foam rolling is self-myofascial release (SMR) and it’s basically a form of self-applied tissue massage. Implements are not limited to the common rollers but to all manner of hard tools, some specially intended for the purpose and others like basketballs and golf balls, decidedly not.
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Quite a Stretch
This is the absolute best article we’ve EVER read on stretching. First and foremost it continually maintains both context and perspective, acknowledging both the satellite view and the zoom lens, the subjective bias of the author and the objective science as it appears to currently stand…
by Paul Ingraham
Stretching just doesn’t have the effects that most runners hope it does. In particular, plentiful recent stretching research has shown that stretching doesn’t (1) warm you up, (2) prevent soreness or injury, or (3) enhance peformance. No other measurable and significant benefit to stretching has ever been proven. Even if it worked, stretching would be inefficient, “proper” technique is controversial at best, and many key muscles are actually biomechanically impossible to stretch — like most of the quadriceps group (which runners never believe without diagrams). If there’s any hope for stretching, it might be a therapeutic effect on muscle “knots” (myofascial trigger points), but even that theory is full of problems…
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A Stretching Experiment
by Paul Ingraham
I am a skeptic, known for my criticisms of stretching. However, I do enjoy stretching, and even I believe that diligent stretching can increase flexibility, because that’s the one effect of stretching that research has backed up. So for thirty days this summer I optimistically stretched my hamstrings — an experiment in the “lab of me.” I was truly disciplined: four full minutes of intense stretching per leg, per day. I did every stretch in a piping hot steam room, which is usually considered an ideal circumstance for stretching, whether that is true or not. What happened? Read the rest of this entry
