Latest / The Driven Athlete / Foam Rolling & Soft-Tissue Prep | Ep 69

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Foam Rolling & Soft-Tissue Prep | Ep 69 · The Driven Athlete

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: If you're a driven, active person who wants to reach and pursue a higher quality life with some ambition, then guess what this podcast is for you.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: This is the Driven Athlete Podcast.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: A question I get a lot and often is should I foam roll or I'm tight?
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: How should I warm up?
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: Should I roll it out?
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Should I push on it with a lacrosse ball?
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: Should I use a Theragun like a Hypervolt compression gun?
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: What are those things for right?
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: I don't hate foam rolling.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: I don't hate using a lacrosse ball or something like that on like a tight, lit up tissue that's bound down and knotted up and stuff.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: I don't hate that stuff.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: I don't hate the Theragun or like the Hypervolt compression gun to work out lit up tissue.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: The underlying goal is those modalities is to just mobilize the tissue.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: It's not a warmup.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: Foam rolling is not a warmup.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Rolling out on the cross ball on like the back of your shoulder, your trap, your glute area, your calf, like whatever, that's not a warmup.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Rolling out on the cross ball on like the back of your shoulder, your trap, your glute area, your calf, like whatever, that's not a warmup.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: Using the Thera gun and a hyper or hypervolt like my shot massage gun, is not a warmup, but they can be valuable tools to help mobile.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: What I usually say is they're valuable tools to help mobilize lit up tissue that's not moving well right.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: Trigger points, myofascial trigger point, release muscles that are knotted up and down down and they can help with what they describe as generating hyaluronic acid, which is the fluid between the interstitial tissue that helps with fiber gliding and pliability between the tissues for gliding rightiding and pliability between the tissues for gliding right.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: It's like lubrication between your tissues, whereas the lubrication for your joints.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: That fluid is called synovial fluid and we definitely have to get synovial fluid and blood flow to your muscle tissue and your joints, and the best way to do that is like an actual dynamic warmup.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: All right, so foam rollers, lacrosse ball, thereragun, massage guns, whatever.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: That's not a warmup, but it's just used to mobilize tissue, which I'm a fan of for sure.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: Right, if there's like a, a knot, like in your lateral hip or like side of your hip, or like at the back of your shoulder, your trap or whatever you know, we can roll that out and work it out.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: It helps to mobilize the tissue.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: What I don't advocate for is crushing the tissue that's my problem when, like in college and like my own workouts and stuff like that, like it hurts kind of good, it hurts so good, right.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: So harder must be better and I'm going to crush the tissue with rolling on it or crushing it with like a lacrosse ball against the wall or the floor.
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: It's not really the goal.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: It actually might lead things getting more lit up and more irritated or sensitive.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: Just mobilize right, you can mobilize the tissue and avenues, for that is like to compress the tissue against a hard surface like the wall or the floor, and just in small ways and not fast, but just roll over that tissue over and over again.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: That just helps to mobilize the tissue and loosen up some myofascial trigger points and knotted tissue.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: And it shouldn't cause referred pain, because that means we're crushing a nerve, which is a problem and like a mistake, where if we're rolling the tissue out and it hurts badly but it kind of hurts good and we're pushing too hard and it's causing symptoms in the area to extend like referred pain, but we crush it Sometimes we're crushing a nerve and just irritating nerve tissue more and that's going to make things worse, right, so there's a difference between rolling out soft tissue and like muscle tissue and then also accidentally, unknowingly crushing a nerve underneath, that, that is going to make things worse and more sensitive and more lit up, and usually less is more is something I usually suggest to people, just in case we're crushing a nerve they don't know otherwise, but also just to not light up the tissue and make it super sensitive after that too, and we don't want to overreat as in like doing like a thousand reps of like crushing the tissue with a foam roller or lacrosse ball or something like that.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: But anyway, it helps to loosen up tissue, stimulate a little bit of hyaluronic acid, and it helps to roll out and mobilize myofascial trigger points and knots, just to mobilize the tissue.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: But it's not a warmup and that's a key difference right there.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: The warmup other topics we've talked about would include a range of things like general blood flow.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: First, a bike, an assault bike, elliptical, a rower going for a walk, a walk, jog, just to get the blood flowing and get the blood going, all right.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: The next thing would be like dynamic stretches right or stretching routine.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: I don't hate static stretching.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: I'm not an advocate for like anything longer than like 20 seconds.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: I don't think it's that big.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: The research is conflicted behind that.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: We're not going to lengthen, make muscles longer, we're just.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: The goal is just to take the muscles and the tissues that surround it to their elastic end range better, multiple times, so that they get more pliable and ready to tolerate athletic intense activity and exercise, versus not doing that and then immediately sprinting or going into a squats and whatever.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: There's not enough blood flow in the tissue for it to be ready to tolerate and create enough power output and it's not pliable enough at this point and the elastic end range hasn't been reached and so the tissues aren't ready to tolerate that kind of intense activity.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: And then after that, foam roll, lacrosse ball workout, tight tissues that maybe are knotted up or whatever right.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: That in total would be preparing someone's body for athletic activity.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: In total we would call that like a warmup, or I like to call it movement prep.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: We're preparing ourselves to tolerate.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: We're imagine if a sprinter were to wake up in the morning, gets his shoes on, gets on the track, doesn't do anything else and just immediately sprints.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: It's a high risk for, like straining, some muscles right and the joints aren't ready to tolerate that kind of impact too.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: We have to get them ready to tolerate the impact.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Another component of that too like but anyway, in general it's just to prepare your body to tolerate high intensity athletic physical activity and exercise and part of that is just bringing the muscles to their elastic end range so that when you take them to stressful end ranges with a lot of pressure and load and tension they're not going to freak out on you and they're not going to strain right, because there's not enough blood flow and synovial fluid and hyaluronic acid in there to tolerate and accommodate that kind of stressful activity.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: That kind of stressful activity Also, with that too, it's like part of it is getting the nerves, the neural engagement and activity to innervate and wake up and recruit motor units.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: So it's, it's a neural activation that also creates more stability and movement control, but also motor unit control for power output where something's going to take the stress too much and that causes that's what causes issues and strains and stuff.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: If someone's like not warmed up enough, you know, I'm saying it's like the beer leagues of softball of adults, adult beer league softball or kickball people showing up and I just like you know, drinking some beers and then, uh, sprint to first base and they tear their achilles or they just strain their hamstring or something like that.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: I've actually seen that a bunch of times.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: Live, they're just not ready yet.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: Like a little bit too stressful for maybe that they've been doing recently, but also they didn't warm up.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: So a combination of those two things leads to like severe injury, and that can be avoided, right.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Or just a little mindfulness too, and then ego lifting or ego movements Just like I can sprint, I can race you, whatever You're not ready.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: That's a key thing.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: So I'm an advocate for foam rolling, lacrosse ball and soft tissue modalities just to loosen things up mile faster.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: Trigger points the other thing I was going to say was part of like the movement prep and warmup.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: If somebody's lifting weights right, their strength training heavy, their first working set, let's say of squats or bench press or something like that they have to build up to that weight tolerance first, right.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: So let's say a person is very strong and they can squat 500 pounds, let's say like Saquon Barkley or something like that right, they can back squat like 500.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: And today we're going to work out, we're going to do five sets of eight reps, which is a big workout.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: It's like a good amount of reps for squat at a high load and we know that they can max out at 500 pounds.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: Well, their working sets aren't really going to start until they get to like 425, let's say right, or 405.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: But rep one and set one they're not going to do 405.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: They're going to do the warmup I just talked about bike, elliptical, rower, whatever general warmup to get the blood flow.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: They're going to do mobility stretching, routine, joint mobilization stuff, dynamic stretching, some static stretching I don't hate that and then activation exercises, part of their movement prep.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: They're going to roll out soft tissues, that's, tight hamstring, quad glute back of their shoulders, like whatever.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: Now they're ready to squat, right, but they haven't like, squatted yet heavy.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: Do you think they're ready to do 405 right now?
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: Heavy, do you think they're ready to do 405 right now?
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: No, they have to build up to that first where they would do 135.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: And then they would do 185.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: And then they would do 250.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: And then they would do 315 for a couple reps, like we're doing, like three to five reps just to build and warm up.
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: They're also getting the nerves that innervate the muscles to wake up and early innervate.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: So they're innervating and recruiting motor units for strength and stability.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: They'd be more efficient and strong for power output.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: If they're not doing that it's just going to cause issues.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: So they build up, pyramid, building up to the set that they want to do.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: But that's just also part of the warmup.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: 135, 225, 275, 315, 375.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: That was four sets.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: Right, maybe five, but that's not the working set because your max is way higher than that.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: You have to build up to that first.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: Now you're ready for your first set.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: Your first working set would be like 405.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: So that's also part of the warmup.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: So for athletes and active people that are intensely working out, consider that for yourselves too.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: For weekend warriors and people that are trying to dabble in fitness, it wouldn't be advisable to show up and just start doing the workout right away without building into it first.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: And part of that is the neural physiology, the neural recruitment and neural activation for the motor unit recruitment and proprioception and power output and strength.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: So just keep that in mind too.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: But anyway, those are my insights.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: On foam rollers, lacrosse balls and massage guns, I don't hate them at all, but they're ancillary to an actual dynamic warmup, just to mobilize tissue and not crush tissue.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: So don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: We're always here to help out.