Hi, I'm Margaret, MelioGuide, and today, I want to talk about self massage.
A lot of you have either seen on TV or are familiar from going to your gym: foam rollers.
And foam rollers are really popular as a tool for doing self massage.
But so often, I have clients that come in and go, "Oh yeah, I tried that, but way too
painful."
And they just don't go there.
So I want to talk about the transition going toward the foam roller, of optimizing the
health of your muscles.
The easiest muscle group to visualize this with...though you can still do this with any
muscle group...but we're going to talk about your quadriceps.
They're given the name quadriceps because there are four muscles, the muscles of the
thigh because we go up and down the stairs all the time, we get up and down from a chair.
They tend to get tight.
We spend a lot of time sitting.
They get tight.
So if you have ever tried a foam roller, or you take your hand with the knuckles and you
rub on your thigh, or if you have any knee pain, those are good indications that your
quadriceps could do with some self massage.
If you feel tenderness with any of those things, starting right on a foam roller is going to
be quite uncomfortable for you.
So I would highly recommend that you approach it in a gentler way for your body.
So for many of my clients, that might mean...
Actually you can stay taking...and you need to be sitting on a chair obviously for this...taking
a towel, if you need lots of padding between you and your rolling pin.
I don't actually own a rolling pin, so this is kind of a sophisticated rolling pin.
You might just start rolling the muscles with your rolling pin and use as many towel layers
as you need to get a nice pain, if you can describe that.
You know that kind of pain that you get when you go, "That feels good.
That's a nice sensation."
With time, you can gradually reduce your towel layers from four to two to none, so that eventually,
you're using your rolling pin and going, "I'm actually feeling really good."
You're going to concentrate on the spots that are really tender.
Those spots you'll massage in one direction, so even though I'm going back and forth, the
emphasis would be in one direction.
The intensity of the massage would be no more than a seven out of ten on a scale of pain.
Again, you want this to feel like a nice pain.
When you've transitioned from using your towel to your rolling pins, and you feel like you're
ready to transition to your foam roller, even that might be too big a transition.
So going right to the foam roller with your body weight now on the foam roller, you might
consider actually using a pillow between you and the foam roller.
I'm going to use this pillow here to demonstrate massaging my quadriceps.
Using the pillow between me and the foam roller, just adjusting here, I'm going to walk forward,
keeping my spine nice and straight, walking on my forearms back and forth until I feel
I've worked out all the spots.
This might take several days or weeks to do that, depending how frequently you do it,
and then you're gradually going from a thick pillow to maybe a folded yoga mat to then
being able to actually use your foam roller.
I hope that helps you in transitioning to self massage using the foam roller.
I will have another blog on all the uses of the foam roller, as well.
So thanks for tuning in.
I'm Margaret from MelioGuide.