Chapter 1

Rolling for Life

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding how rollers will change your life

Answering questions to see how rollers impact your five body zones

Challenging yourself with roller workouts

Managing and preventing injuries to change your life

Welcome to the first physical therapy-based roller treatment book with easy-to-follow treatment programs. After using the treatments and workouts in this book, you'll never look at your rollers in the same way again.

I'm assuming that you purchased Foam Rolling For Dummies for one of three reasons:

• You have a roller, but you don't really know how to use it properly.
• You're looking for an effective way to keep you body moving like it did ten years ago.
• You're tired of being in pain or always being injured.

If so, you're reading the perfect book for you. All three are great reasons to learn how to use a muscle roller in the right way.

I want to clarify a terminology issue before we start our journey together. The title of this book obviously includes "Foam Rolling." While you will be using some foam rollers with your muscle treatments, I'll refer to all of them simply as "rollers." Many of the rollers, roller balls, vibrating rollers, and roller sticks I use are made of a variety of materials other than foam.

The Mind of an All-Pro Roller

I worked for 26 years in the National Football League (NFL) in a hands-on role as the Head Athletic Trainer/Physical Therapist. I learned the art of teaching sports medicine techniques to elite athletes to help them both manage their injuries and optimize their ability to move pain-free. I want to share those same sports medicine skills, normally reserved for world-class athletes, with you and your roller.

This game plan starts with teaching you to think about using rollers in your daily routine. Knowing when and when not to use a roller or roller ball is extremely important in order to stay safe. Understanding the following benefits of rollers will help you effectively apply them to your busy schedule each day:

• They improve posture after a great night of sleep.
• They loosen tight muscles before exercise.
• They reduce pain in a trigger point or a "knot" in a muscle.
• They accelerate recovery following exercise.

This is not your typical how-to book. I'm not taking the easy route by simply telling you to "use this roller for that injury" or "roll like this." You've spent your hard-earned money to purchase this book, and you deserve better.

Understanding the many amazing uses of a roller will help you apply the roller treatments in Chapters 16 to 20. Each treatment in the five body zones and the challenging roller workouts has a progression structure built in to help you accelerate your improvements. I'll help you think like an all-pro roller, knowing exactly when to ramp your roller treatments and workouts up or down.

Rollers 101

Finding the right roller for you is the smart place to start. With so many variables when it comes to rollers, this task is not as easy as it sounds. Rollers vary in shape, size, material, uses, and mechanical vibrations. Because of the wide range of roller traits, they provide a wide range of benefits.

To help select the perfect roller for you, let's assume you're experiencing muscle tightness. You desperately want to run in the local 5K road race this weekend, so you need to reduce the muscle tightness and its associated pain.

With this scenario in mind, here are a few examples to help you select the best roller for you:

• Pain is located in the front (quadriceps), back (hamstrings), outside (iliotibial band), or inside (groin) of the thigh.

  Use a cylindrical full roller (see Chapter 2).

• Pain is located in the lower, outside corner of the shin.

  Use a round, hard roller ball (see Chapter 17).

• Pain is located in the lower back and outside corner of the hip.

  Use a half roller (see Chapter 18).

After selecting the perfect roller for you, you need to find a safe place to roll. I don't want you getting injured while rolling, so your "launch pad" to roll needs to be risk-free. Rolling surfaces can include a carpeted floor, a hard wall, backyard grass, dirt in a campground, or a wooden gym floor. The key safety tip is to have plenty of space, with no risky obstacles nearby disguised as pets, sharp objects, children, unstable objects, or sporting equipment.

Getting Under Your Skin

If you're like most people, you're looking for safe and effective ways to stay healthy. This starts with understanding what's really going on under your skin. If you think the same, well, I have you covered in Chapters 10 to 15. It won't earn you a medical degree, but you'll love my "keep it simple" teaching style helping you to understand your body's inner workings. Together, we'll walk through cool topics like muscles, fascia, trigger points, pain, scar tissue, nerves, and posture.

As an example, when your muscles are forced to work hard in a limited range of motion, they become tight and restricted. Think of the last time you had to carry a heavy bag in your hand for a prolonged period of time. Maybe you were carrying heavy luggage through the airport or groceries in from the car. Regardless, your finger flexor muscles quickly became tight and painful.

This would be a simple example of tight, overworked muscles and fascia that would benefit from a two- to three-minute rolling treatment from Chapter 20 using a roller ball.

Tight fascia wrapped around all your muscles, bones, organs, and joints will limit your mobility. Roller treatments are quick solutions to keep your fascia and muscles loose and limber. Unlike long flexibility classes and tedious flexibility routines, the roller treatments found in Chapters 16 to 20 focus on the source of the tightness - painful trigger points - which can be eliminated in less than five minutes!

Key Questions for You

The power of this book lies in both your hands and your mind. This book gives you the ability to take ownership of your muscles and how they function. Too often, I see individuals blindly hand their health and livelihood over to someone else. In doing so, a vast majority of the responsibility for that patient's health, activity level, and attitude is guided by their doctor, family members, spouse, physical therapist, personal trainer, and so on. That type of passive approach is a formula for a sub-par outcome.

Instead, I encourage my patients to take an active approach to their health. I don't recommend that you "go rogue" and blaze your own trail back to a healthy you. But I do encourage you to build your own wellness team with skilled and caring specialists while keeping yourself firming positioned in the driver's seat.

To find the right answers as the captain of your wellness team, you must start with some key questions.

How do I unlock my thigh and hamstrings muscles?

Prolonged sitting, walking in dress shoes, and standing on hard surfaces typically results in tight and painful quads and hamstrings. These restricted muscles struggle to flush out waste products as they desperately scream for the inflow of fresh, oxygen-heavy, healthy blood.

Besides your audible grunts and groans, your simple active movement can become labored and strenuous. After periods of prolonged sitting or standing, do your legs feel like you're wearing a pair of jeans that are two sizes too small? If so, then you'll love Chapter 16. You'll learn how to unlock your thigh muscles, as shown in Figure 1-1, to regain pain-free muscle mobility and flexibility.

Photography by Haim Ariav & Klara Cu

FIGURE 1-1: Unlocking the hard-working upper quadriceps muscles.

Why do my lower legs always seem to be my troublemaking "Achilles heels"?

Your quads may get all the hype in the beach photos, but your shin muscles have certainly earned the need for some love. Your calf muscles on the back, peroneal muscles on the outside, and ankle dorsi flexor muscles on the front of the shins are the unsung heroes of your active lifestyle.

Your shins and their many muscles, tendons, fascia, and ligaments have a difficult task of keeping you balanced while battling with the ground on each and every step. Because of this, when any of the muscles in your shin or foot become tight or injured, the results can be painful.

Training for my sixth Ironman triathlon in Austria at the age of 46, I strained my calf three times! The last muscle injury, five weeks before my big race, was so severe that I had to break off small branches of a tree to build a mock heel lift for my shoes just to be able to limp home.

The outcome: Thanks to the treatments in Chapter 17 (see Figure 1-2) and the strengthening exercises and stretches in Chapter 21, I had my personal best time of 10 hours, 36 minutes, and 46 seconds.

Photography by Haim Ariav & Klara Cu

FIGURE 1-2: Roller...