♪ Bob and Brad ♪
♪ The two most famous ♪
♪ Physical therapist ♪
♪ On the internet ♪
- Hi, I'm Sara Meeks and I'm here today
to go through a set of two videos
showing the use of foam rollers
for the management of osteoporosis.
So the first thing I'm going to do is explain
why I do it, and using my skeletal model here,
how it works with the skeleton, and so on.
And then in the second one,
we have a model who's going to go through the exercises
I'll be instructing her in in the rollers.
So the idea of the management of osteoporosis for me
is always lengthening of the vertebral column in the front.
I call this the front of the backbone
and this is where most fractures and compression occurs.
And if we turn the model over,
we see that we have these spinous processes.
So by lying prone, and also when you're lying on your back,
if you have pressure on these,
you're going to have increased lengthening
of the vertebrae on the front.
So that's kind of the idea,
putting the pressure on the back
to lengthen the front.
Also to take the pressure off
from the intervertebral discs,
you'll notice that there are discs in between
each vertebra that acts like a little sponge there
to take the pressure off from the vertebra itself.
So when I have people use the rollers,
the one I usually start with is this one.
This is a soft density,
half roller.
So when the person lies on it,
they lie on the round surface
but it's very stable because the other side of it
is flat on the table or on the floor.
So
to get onto the roller, the safest way,
and this is the way I teach people to do it,
is I have them roll to one side
and I wedge the roller up behind their back
and then I have them roll up onto the roller.
So now we're getting the pressure on the back,
on the spinous processes, they're called,
on the back, those little pointy bones there,
which is pressing upward,
and again creating the lengthening here.
And the idea is when the person is lying on the roller,
I take them through a series of exercises.
I will have the model lie on the roller
with their hands on the table,
and usually their hips and their knees bent
and the feet flat.
But sometimes I put a roller under the knees when we start
to avoid cramping of the muscles
that they're not used to using, and so on.
And so they're lying on the roller,
and just the lying on the roller itself
will help lengthening.
And then when they get off the roller,
most people will notice
that the back actually feels longer.
And when they get off the table,
then they can stand up taller and so on
just by lying on the roller.
So I start everyone on the one here.
It's a soft density, half round roller.
And so everybody, no matter who they are,
no matter how old they are,
no matter what their situation is,
this is the roller that we start with.
And once they can master this,
then we can move on to other rollers.
I have a lot of rollers here.
Now, for example, this one is a full round.
I think it's a four-inch diameter.
And so, but this one would be more unstable
because it is fully round.
I also have another roller.
Let me see here. I have a roller.
Here is another half roller.
They come in different colors.
This is a hard density.
This one is another half roller
and it's a soft density.
But it's not as soft as this one.
This is the one that I always start with.
And then they may progress to this one.
All of these rollers, I should mention,
have been sent to me by a company called OPTP,
Orthopedic Physical Therapy Products out in Minneapolis.
And I wanna say thank you to them
for sending me the many rollers.
Some of them I already had,
but they sent me more for this set of videos.
Now the roller that somebody,
most people seem to like the most is this one.
This is because it's very pretty, hot pink.
So it's a full round, six-inch diameter roller.
And this is the one that's the most popular.
There are other six-inch diameters
like the blue one over there.
That's a firmer density.
There's another four-inch.
And then if we wanna get very specific,
and the people go through the exercises
on the other rollers, I recommend this one.
This is a firm density,
three-inch diameter.
And the difference is that now we can get the force
on the spine more specifically
on the spinous processes.
So it's a small roller but it can be harder to do
than the larger rollers.
So when you graduate to this one,
and I use this one
and I have other people that have used
the three-inch one and they really like it
because very, very specific.
And that's one of the principles
of the Meeks Method, is specificity of movement.
The more specific I can get to the area that needs
to be worked on, the better it is.
So that's the three-inch firm density, not for everybody
but it works great.
I also have a roller in the front here,
this large density.
Now people don't usually get that one.
That's one that I use for therapy,
that when I'm doing stretching of the hips
and the knees and so on,
this is a roller that I use quite a lot
for the therapy sessions.
So we know that, and I may have mentioned this before
that some of the tightness that we have in our hips
and our knees, and even down into our feet
affect the alignment of the spine.
So I use that roller in therapy.
Now I have another roller here.
It's called a Smartroller.
It's the only roller in the United States
that has been trademarked
and the therapist's name is Stacy Barrows,
she's out in California.
And some of the advantages of this roller
is it's irregular in shape.
It's not round and it's not really flat on one side either.
And so you can have,
the person could lie on either side
And one of the exercises that Stacy has people do,
in fact, I think she told me
one of her patients kind of invented it,
is you can rock on this side-to-side
and that's really relaxing for the spine.
And it also contributes in a very safe way
because they're rolling,
they're twisting the spine side to side.
Now the spine and the bones are the weakest
in that movement.
But when you're lying on your back,
you have gravity eliminated
and then you can get that sheer force on the bones
and on the discs in a very safe way.
It's an exercise that I would probably do
after my patient has been with me
for maybe five or six sessions.
And they've learned some stability exercises
and so on so that they're safer on that.
but there's also the Smartroller.
And at the end of this video
there will be a link to Stacy's website.
She has a lot of information on the use
of the Smartroller and probably other rollers too.
And so her information will be there for you.
So that's a little bit of an introduction
to the foam rollers,
and we're going to go immediately.
We're gonna end this one and then go to the next one
which will be showing the exercises
that can be done on the rollers.
Thank you for watching this video.
(upbeat guitar music)