Are you feeling tight muscles? Especially around the calves, the legs, the feet?
The go-to is usually to stretch, right?
Yet, while you may feel better after a good long stretch, in only a few short hours you’re back to feeling tight again.
For some, particularly during specific stretch moves in the calves or feet, they may even experience cramps. Not fun! and YES! today we’ll go through an alternative.
While stretching is great to lengthen out the muscle and increase flexibility, there’s another technique that creates a real sense of freedom and mobility in your body when done either with stretching or on it’s own.
The technique is known as Foam Rolling.
Foam rolling decreases pain, increases mobility and relaxes the body, and the results may last longer than your standard stretch.
Here’s How it Does This:
- Makes you feel Relaxed: It turns on your calming relaxation system known as the Parasympathetic system
- Your muscles move Freely: It allows the outside casing of your muscles (known as fascia) to move smoothly over your muscles
- Reduces pain and Restriction: You’re literally ironing out small knots, adhesions and scar tissue that have been restricting your range of motion. By doing this, you reduce body aches and pain.
The Major DownSide to Foam Rolling:
There are two types of women who rightly give up the benefit of foam rolling because it hurts too much or feels too awkward (even after practice).
During a typical foam rolling session for tight leg muscles you’re lying on the floor, legs on a foam roller, and you use your upper body to roll back and forth across the surface.
If you’re just starting on your fitness and weight loss journey, and when trying to place your entire body weight over a rolling “log like” object, it understandably feels awkward. It’s hard to master the technique.
It may also feel as if it’s more a form of upper body workout than an actual relaxing stretch. For you, it may not relaxing. It may turn you right off.
Also, if you’ve tried it before but the sheer agony of placing your whole body weight on a tight sore muscle has made you vow you’d never put yourself through that again. That’s also really understandable.
So can you get all of the Wonderful Calming Mobility Benefits of Foam Rolling without all of the Down sides?
The fix is simple. Instead of lying on a foam roller, you hold your rolling apparatus in what I call ” The Rolling Pin Technique”.
The Rolling Pin Technique:
- Go to your kitchen and grab your rolling pin. The same rolling pin you bake with.
- Sit on a chair
- Gently press the rolling pin into sore muscles of your legs and roll up and down your muscles gently
- If you feel a bump (like a muscle knot) hold the rolling pin until the knot subsides
- Apply the pressure you feel most comfortable with
That rolling pin serves as so much more than an apparatus to smooth out lumps in your baking dough.
It also smooths out the knots, and the adhesions in your muscles.
The great part is, you apply the pressure that feels most comfortable to you.
While it still acts as an upper body workout (as you apply the pressure) it’s not as intense or awkward
In this week’s workout video I show you exactly how to use your rolling pin to loosen tight muscles, increase your mobility and feel calm and free in your body!
