So you finally listened and added a foam roller as part of your routine?
But what if I told you that this right here could be causing you more problems than you
had, that made you reach for it in the first place.
I'll explain it all today.
What's up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM
The foam roller, towel I roll, right.
We've heard that phrase before but never has it been more true than it will be by the time
you're done watching this video.
How you foam roll means more than the fact that you're just foam rolling alone, ok.
Because doing foam rolling in the wrong way, can actually be more detrimental to what you
were even doing it for in the first place.
In order to understand that guys, I wanted to start by drawing a little bit here for
you.
First of all this is the side view of somebody's leg and butt over here.
Well we're going to get back to that in one second.
Because first and foremost the way that fascia and muscles work together is the fascia is
what overlies the muscle belly.
And it sort of works in the type of way, ok sort of like a diamond shape.
And if you were to push on these ends, right, this way, then these two are going to get
further apart.
If you think about, I'll show a picture here, those chinese finger traps, right.
Have you ever had your fingers in these things, you try to pull them out?
What's happening is you try to pull, is these parts just gets closer together.
It makes it harder for you to pull your fingers out of.
Meanwhile the way to get out of that is to actually push your fingers closer together,
that makes it expand in this direction and then your fingers can get out.
Fascia works in much the same way.
So again if you were to push this direction and this direction, ok then these would go
out to the side.
Alright so now realizing how that fascia works, lets take it over to a real world example
that a lot of guys I'm sure could relate to.
We're talking about here the IT band and for those guys that don't know exactly what that
is.
It's that big stretch of tendinous structure that goes down the outside of your leg,
that will, a lot of times result in pain especially for runners, guys who do a lot of biking,
even guys who sit for a long periods of time.
You get that pain, characteristically, right on the outside of your knee, ok right above
that boney, the bump right on the outside of your knee.
This guys, beyond the scope of this video, the IT Band is really sort of being just put
in the middle of a lot of different muscles that attach into this tendon.
And what we have here is two at the top and two at the bottom.
I won't even talk about the two at the bottom for now.
Those are really the anterior tib and the peroneus longus down at the bottom.
But again just for now understand that we have our tensor fascia which starts from here
and we have our glute max which starts from here.
You can see they both feed into this right here, IT Band.
Now here's the really important point when it comes to the foam roller, guys will just
blanketly take out the foam roller as they've been instructed and just start rolling away
thinking that they're doing a good job.
The problem is again, IT bands get flared up because of this imbalance between the pull
of all four muscles that are feeding into it.
So if we look at the tensor fascia, this is more on the front side, this is more on the
hip flexion side, this is the one that tends to get short and tight.
The problem is imbalance here in the back, the glutes tend, the glute max tends to get
long and weak.
Now if you think about how we talked about how muscle fascia reacts to foam rolling,
basically if you are to go in the direction of the fibers here, ok,
if I were to go back and forth this way, you're basically increasing the length here, of the
muscle belly, ok and then narrowing it.
So in this case, all you're doing is taking a long weak muscle, the glutes, and making
them longer.
That is not an indication for why you'd be using the foam roller.
If however you took the short tensor fascia and you rolled in the direction of the fibers,
you would be taking a shorter tight muscle and increasing it's length . That's a good
thing.
But you can see that the direction of the foam roller makes all the difference.
If you just said, I'm going to blanketly roll this thing up and down my leg, one you could
be creating a benefit, the other you could be furthering a problem.
So when it comes to something, especially like the IT Band, and the same thing applies
down below the knee, if you're going to just blanketly roll over these muscles thinking
that you're stretching this thing out or improving the tissue quality, I can tell you right now,
you're not.
You have to have a bit more of a specific approach to what you're doing than that.
So if I break out the foam roller here, you can see that again with the glute max, if
I was going to take this foam roller and roll it in this direction, right, this is in the
direction of the fibers.
Down like that across the hip.
Which is what a lot of guys will do, you see them all the time.
They get on the thing and they roll it right across.
That's only making the situation worse.
If I wanted to try to tighten that a little bit, obviously first and foremost, strength
training is going to be our best weapon to try to tighten and add some tone to that glute
max.
So once again, I always talk about glute amnesia, that's definitely going on in most people.
We could roll in this direction.
ok, which would be against the direction of the fibers.
So if we did that, that would basically stretch it out this way, right, which would pull it
in this way, based on this method over here.
Right, so if we do this, it pulls it in.
That would actually give us a little bit more of a benefit of what we were looking for.
So a glute max, don't roll this way, roll that way.
TFL again this muscle goes straight up and down, so if we go in the direction of that
muscle group right there, then basically we are going to increase it's length from top
to bottom.
That's what we're looking for.
Some guys, I'll see they, they'll say, I'm going to take this foam roller and roll it
right against my leg over here, like this and just roll it right over the whole leg.
Because I want to feel it the whole time.That's wrong.
If you do that all you're doing is sort of helping to shorten the structure that's already
short and tight.
So again guys, it makes a difference.
As I always say everything makes a difference.
How you train, what you eat, the way you sequence your reps, the way you sequence your sets.
Anything written on paper looks good until it's put in practice and it can become really
bad real quickly.
Ok, so that's why it could be any workout program, could be any recognition of foam
roll.
Anything that looks good on paper, done incorrectly can be pretty bad.
So guys, start doing, taking a little bit more of that second level approach in our
step to what you're doing and, I'm telling you, you'll start to see much faster results.
And also a more significant step towards the direction of actually trying to achieve in
the first place.
In this case a looser and a better feeling IT Band.
Guys if you haven't already and you want to take that second step with me being your coach
along the way, then head to ATHLEANX.COM right now and grab your 90 day training program.
See what it's like to train like an athlete.
And to address these things, as if it was your career, like an athlete, where all these
things matter.
Alright guys, I'll see you there.
In the meantime, let me know what other types of problems do you suffer from.
If you want, I can make that other video talking about the lower half of this from the ankle
up.
And how that contributes to IT Band as well.
Or other issues that are bothering you.
Maybe we can discuss them here as we do sometimes with our PT type videos
Alright guys, I'll talk to you soon.