When it comes to foam rolling you hear a lot of buzz words associated with it like “recovery,” “adhesions,” and “mobility.”
Foam rolling has certainly gained popularity over the last few years as people realize they can massage themselves with just a PVC pipe or ball.
Typically, you’ll find someone getting friendly with a roller on the floor for five to ten minutes, trying not to let people see the amount of pain they’re in or hear the weird grunting noises they’re making.
But why? Do we really know what foam rolling is actually doing?
What People ‘Think’ Foam Rolling is Doing for Them
Ask anyone you find rolling and you usually hear something along the lines of “I’m breaking adhesions” or “reducing DOMS”, in efforts to increase their range of motion or decrease soreness. But where are these answers coming from? How do we know what’s right or wrong? In this article, we will cover what the science says is actually happening when we foam roll as well as the best and most effective ways to do foam rolling.
When we take a peek at manual therapy (massage, Grastin, foam rolling, etc.) and what the literature says about its effectiveness, we can see where misconceptions of making physical tissue changes may come from. Researchers from Japan gave us evidence of rat ligament remodeling (actually changing their physical structure) when the ligaments were scraped with human-sized tools. By scraping rat ligaments and physically changing their structure, there was an observed tissue healing [1]. These effects lead to the hypothesis that we can get the same results in humans if we create a similar type of stress to the tissues.
However, just because this worked on rats does not mean that the same strategy will work in humans. Keep in mind that these were rat tissues being scraped with human-sized tools. This would be the equivalent of applying thousands of pounds of pressure to that “tight” IT band you just can’t seem to loosen up.
The research supports the idea that we can’t bring about permanent changes on targeted tissues simply by foam rolling. In fact, extremely large loads would be required to make just a 1% change in the tissue structure [2]. This is probably a good thing, as our muscles should be able to withstand high loads and you know…stay together.
The Real Reason You Foam Roll
So, when someone tells you that you should foam roll to ‘change the structure of the underlying tissues’ (a common assertion made by fitness gurus), understand that this isn’t necessarily supported by the science. The reason you probably foam roll in the first place is it simply makes you feel better. It makes you feel better by making you less sore or it makes you feel better by being more flexible.
We know that static stretching has similar positive effects but there is also evidence of performance decrements after stretching [3].
We are finding that foam rolling may lead to similar positive effects of increasing range of motion/flexibility without the inherent drop in performance [4].
This is good!
Foam Rolling and Perceptions of Pain
If physical tissue changes aren’t being made, what’s actually happening when we foam roll?
Enter the neurophysiological model. It’s essentially suggesting that by rolling or even stretching, we’re influencing nerve receptors near or within the muscle, relieving the neural signals that may be sent to affected muscles such as pain or stiffness. This reduces pain perception and neural tone that could be a potential explanation for an increased range of motion or decreased soreness.
One simple example of this was demonstrated by Behm et al. who found that stretching the lower body can increase range of motion in the upper body [5]! And it’s not only seen in stretching studies. We find that we have this same spillover effect with responses to pain in foam rolling too. Aboodarda and colleagues observed an increase in pain pressure threshold following foam rolling [6]. This means that there was less pain when putting pressure on a painful area of the body after foam rolling.
More interestingly, he tested contralateral changes in muscle function, meaning he rolled one muscle and then tested the same muscle but on the opposite side of the body and found a reduction in pain. This is most likely due to the fact that there is a new signal for the nervous system to interpret and change its output (to the muscles).
It’s the same thing that happens when you slam your finger in a door or step on a Lego. You may immediately start rubbing or shaking the affected area to distract those pain signals the brain is bringing in and sending out as pain. This delves into pain science as we know there are multiple factors the brain takes in to output pain such as stress, fear avoidance behaviors, and memory [7].
Putting Foam Rolling into Your Routine
While foam rolling can improve range of motion and decrease the perception of pain in a muscle, these changes are acute in nature (they do not last very long) [8]. So spending 15 minutes rolling around before you go to bed just may not be the most effective way of going about your prehab.
A better strategy is to do short, frequent bouts of foam rolling followed by immediate loading (think resistance training) and movement of those same tissues.
The idea here is that we are finding these new ranges of motion from short bouts of rolling (about 30 seconds concentrated on one muscle group) and then immediately loading them with less discomfort.
This makes sense as we are telling the nervous system to calm down and give us these new, pain-free ranges of motion and then reinforcing it with loaded movement through the range. Feeling it’s tough to get in the hole squatting? Roll out your hip musculature between warm-up sets to get to a lower, more comfortable bottom position by the time you get to your working sets. Then continue working in this range of motion for the duration of the workout. This is where long-term adaptations happen as we train a new range of motion that we must now stabilize through and where we can really get the most out of our prehab practices.
The key here is short bouts of rolling followed by immediate loading! We find there are positive effects in rolling with just ten seconds per set [9]. You’ll save more time and get more out of your rolling, leaving time to focus on the other important aspects of training.
And now some last words to remind you that none of this information should be taken as medical advice. So if you’re jacked up or have anything else going on that should be looked at by your doctor, take it up with them, and not this article.