Stretching is necessary to keep our muscles flexible so that we maintain full range of motion. It’s important to be able to lift our arms up to put a shirt on and reach in the back seat of a car to grab the grocery bags. Strengthening is important as well. It keeps our bones dense and strong, gives us energy and good posture. We want to always be able to climb stairs and move furniture and look good doing it. And having good posture does make us look better along with feeling better.
But if you’ve ever had pain or just not quite felt right and you’ve stretched and strengthened without relief, it’s probably because your body needs compression. This is where the use of a foam roller or tennis ball can come to the rescue. A foam roller covers larger areas of muscle while the tennis ball is smaller, so it is more specific and gets in there deeper. Experiment to see what works best for you.
The benefit of self treatment is that you can do it as often as you want, whenever you want. Sometimes you’d rather let someone else do the work for you. That way you can relax while at the same time get your muscles worked on, killing two birds with one stone.
The way I work regarding pressure is to put you in a place where you don’t want more and you don’t want less. If it’s not enough pressure, your muscles won’t be worked enough to provide relief and if it’s too painful, your body will tense and not allow me to get into your muscles deep enough. Either way, too much or too little, your muscles won’t benefit and you won’t get relief. “Hurts so good” is a therapeutically delicious place to be.
