If you’re an athlete of any kind, have ever been, or are an active individual, you must have experienced muscle tightness. If left untreated this tightness can undermine your performance or accumulate to cause serious conditions. Particularly, in sports like powerlifting, minor problems can cause serious harm, because your performance depends on how much stress your body and mind can handle. A little twist can take months off of your training schedule.
Myofascial release is the answer to these woes. Myofascial release simply is the process of systematically massaging these problematic areas in order to release pressure from the muscle groups. Traditionally, this has been done with assistance of a physiotherapist or a trained sports massage therapist. But in the past years, foam roller have become quite popular as they allow for self-myofascial release. In this article, we talk about some of the ways, in which you can utilize a foam roller to your benefit.
Rolling on Calves
In this exercise, you sit on the floor with your legs stretched out. You hands are also on the floor behind, with fingers facing towards hips. Then you put a wide roller under your ankles, just above the achilles tendon. Then you use your arms to raise your hips up, so that they are now level with knees and ankles. Then gently, keeping pressure on the roller, with your arms, you move your hips forward, taking your legs along, in the same posture. Keep rolling until the roller reacher the back of your knees, then repeat.
Hamstrings
Similarly, you can also operate the roller on your thighs. Start from the knees, and end just before the hips. But, in this position, it is much easier to go on leg at a time. So, on leg stays on the roller, and the other is rested by keeping it crossed over the lower leg. If you, take the push-up stance, and insert a roller under your thighs, then cross one leg over the other, so that at one time only one of the thighs is pressed by the roller, you can achieve massage of the quads. You should start just above the knee and end beneath the torso. For outer and inner thighs, you can alter the same technique.
In addition to using foam rolling for post workout stress release, you can try to avoid serious injuries in the first place, by using supplies like a good pair of wrist wraps, which will keep your wrists safe, and mouth guards that prevent you from accidentally biting your cheek or tongue when you’re exerting.
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