(upbeat music)
- Hello, my name is Bob Schrupp
and I'm a physical therapist.
Today, I'd like to talk about
some of the self-massage tools
and these are actually quite helpful
for things such as general muscle soreness
and fibro myalgia and I like to keep one
around the house, just, I just keep it hanging
over near my workout area, actually.
And, when I'm having some soreness,
I go ahead and use it and I'll go over
that in just a minute.
There are quite a few different tools out there
that you can use and I'm just going to name some of 'em.
There's the Backnobber II, which is by
The Pressure Positive company, there's the Body Back Buddy
and this is the Thera Cane massager.
And they're all very similar a, you know, in forms of,
they all have different knobs that you could use
to help put pressure on the various parts of the muscles.
So, we'll go over that right now.
Okay, when you're gonna use one of these self-massage tools,
generally what you're trying to do is your,
your trying to look for trigger points
and trigger points is just a sore spot in the muscle
and you're going to try and relieve the pain
of that trigger point.
So, you're gonna put pressure right on it
and quite often what you find is if you put,
let's say there was a trigger point right here,
if you put direct pressure on there, for,
and what they recommend is 8-20 seconds,
sometimes it takes that long,
when you put the direct pressure off,
you'll find that point or that area of soreness
will actually dissipate or, or be aleved, alleviated.
So, a couple of other things to keep in mind
when you are gonna do this,
when you're putting the pressure on there,
on the pain scale of 0-10,
I wouldn't go above a five or a six.
Just, I don't want you killing yourself
or increasing the pain.
The muscle should be somewhat relaxed,
with the exception of one technique
that we're gonna go over where we
actually gonna have the muscles moving.
The other thing is your gonna wanna stay away
from arteries, veins, and nerves.
I mean, you don't wanna be doing it
on the carotid artery here.
You don't wanna be doing it on your throat.
You don't wanna be doing it up in your armpit, here.
There's a lot of nerves, artery, veins.
Back of the knee, you know, just,
just some common place areas that I think you'd wanna avoid.
You wanna, you know, begin to apply and
everyone is laughing about this.
You wanna begin to apply and slowly
and gradually increase the pressure.
I'm gonna have Brad come in right now.
Brad, do you wanna introduce yourself?
- [Brad] Yeah.
I'm Brad Heineck, physical therapist,
and we're gonna help Bob on his,
just reading a book on how to treat your own neck,
so that fits right in with this.
- There you go, he's always reading.
Okay, so Brad, if you wanna first maybe just turn this way.
Now, there's a lot of trigger points
and if you, if you look for, you know,
if you're really interested in it,
there are actually charts on the internet
that you can find that actually show
where the different, various, trigger points are.
But, in your case, all I would do is,
you know, find the sore areas
and let's, watch you find the sore area Brad,
that you normally might bother you.
- [Brad] When I normally treat myself,
there's this one up here or there's another one
right back in here, before I get to.
- And that's real common.
- [Brad] Yeah, you can find it, it's not,
you know, a thing you have to be trained on,
you'll know when you get over it.
You just poke around and eventually its' right there,
I can feel it, right there.
- So, the traditional way of treating that trigger point
would again, you find the spot, you gently start
to apply the pressure and you increase the pressure,
you don't go above a five or a six
on the, on the pain scale.
And eventually, hopefully, it releases.
Now, what I've, the way I've used this
is actually, it's almost a variation of a technique
by, by Mulligan, he's a physical therapist
out of New Zealand.
And he does what are called mobilizations with movement.
So and this, what I like the way to use this
is I actually apply the pressure
and then I actually do some movement with it.
Maybe some rotations or maybe even some neck movement.
And I, I just find I get more relief that way.
So, it's just another variation of how you might use it.
Yeah, there you go, that's, that, to me,
is a great way to, to apply it.
- [Brad] Yeah, it feels good.
I use these a lot with patients as well,
'cause it's a self treatment,
something they can do on there own
and you don't have to have someone else do it to you.
- And this is one that I think there are
certain diagnosis that are really works well with it.
One is fiber myalgia, I, I definitely had a couple
fiber myalgia patients, who've had fiber myalgia that,
that went ahead and bought one of these canes to,
to go and help self treat.
We'll go ahead in the next section
and we'll talk about some, if you don't wanna buy a cane,
maybe some home remedies you can do.
- Where do you get these?
- You can get these, I'll go look on the internet
and I give the names of the companies
- Right.
- So, just go online and you can order right online
like so many other things nowadays.
- Yup, that's right.
- All right.
- All right, Lindsey, the camera woman,
mentioned that I, I might not have a
let people know what the pain scale is.
Generally, the pain scale, what we use when we're talking
about that is from 0-10.
Zero means that you're having no pain
and ten means that you're having pain
so bad that you might have to go to the emergency room.
So, it's, it's about as high as pain can get.
So, when we were telling you to apply the pressure
on the trigger points, you know, five to six,
you know when you're somewhere in that little bit
above average pain range and it's a subjective thing,
there's no right or wrong, but just...