4 Steps For Increasing Muscle Recovery Without Supplements!
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Do you need to be a massage therapist to be able to use myofascial release techniques? No way. In this video, I’m going to give you the exact tools and steps that you can use to proper release muscle tension or fascia, as well as the common mistakes that I see a lot of people making or coaches making. But before I dive into that, just a quick reminder hit a subscribe button for this channel to see new movement related content every single week. Now, as a massage practitioner, and movement specialist, more often than not, I can produce the same myofascial release results without having to put my hands on somebody, which is an awesome skill set to have as a personal trainer, and as a virtual trainer in this post COVID world. Which if you want to actually dive deeper into that whole concept, check out this video I made on how to coach restoration virtually. It’s a sweet setup. Now let me get into this one. Why would someone need myofascial release? Or what does that term actually really mean? What Myo means muscle fascia is essentially this coating this sheath around muscles, that essentially makes it shape. It’s the container at which the muscle lives in. It shapes the direction at which the muscles actually lengthen or strengthen. Once you think of it like this, think about like a sausage, right? Think about the casing of that sausage is the fascia or the Myo fascial. Part of that what we’re talking about the meat inside that sausage is essentially the muscle. So without that casing, what do you have, we’ve kind of have just ground meat, right, you kind of have just this again, you have function, but you have form, but the fascia is the one that limits our range of motion. Again, it’s inner woven within every single fiber in our body, especially muscle fibers. So therefore, when we get tight, our Mashel, our five myofascial scuze, me needs to get released needs to get broken up. Because we want more range of motion, we want more function within the body’s capacity to move. And if we can’t do that, well then we’re limited in our principle of movement and our performance and our range of motion. So think of it like this. If we don’t release fascia, then it’s harder to stretch that fascia. If we don’t stretch that fascia that’s harder to load and explode that fascia. And some fascia or some myofascial releasing needs to be done because the fascia is so bound down. It’s almost stuck. It’s almost like glued together, or it’s so dehydrated. And that’s what you can see like fascia isn’t this plastic object, it’s very fluid. If it reduces the fluidity, it reduces its hydration. So what you’re essentially doing, think about this sponge that’s on your countertop. And then you go on a one week vacation, you come back, and what does that sponge now look like? Well, it’s pretty dried up, it’s actually miss shaped, it’s probably in some sort of concave or convex. positioning, right? It’s hard. You try to bend it, it doesn’t really bend can now take a little bit of physicality squeezing, pushing, and hydration. What does that sponge do? Pops that expands. Now, what does that sponge now do in terms of function? It bends, it twists, it folds. And when you release that fold, what happens to pop it pops back to its original shape. It’s very fluid. It’s very supple, in a sense, right? That’s healthy Myo fascia. And that’s what we want. So that’s what it means. What tools though, can we use to facilitate myofascial release? Well, let’s just take the physical self out of it. Let’s take a massage practitioners elbow, foot, knee, hand, whatever the case is out of the equation, and look at this little pile behind me here or two beside me. What we’re looking at here is we’re looking at a lot of equipment, we have the gold standard foam roller, right when I first started in the facility, they were like three feet long, we have this real soft kind of foam that broke down pretty easily and they were white. Well, those are kind of a thing of the past. Now because we’re starting to go something a little bit more kind of solid. So foam roller would work. Then we have a little bit more of a kind of surgical dialed in effect with the foam ball right a little bit more pointed, in a sense I’m getting to more places think that is more like an elbow versus a forearm would be the engine in terms of application rise much more broad service much more pointed surface. If you are a massage practitioner in comparison, then you can get real down to the nitty gritty with like a roller. This can go on someone’s foot or even into smaller parts of the body either using that ball to get into someone’s like hip flexor. Then you got the good old fashioned that just go to a sporting goods store and get a lacrosse ball always works really well or a tennis ball golf ball. And then you get some some more of these like Thera cane type of setups where you can get kind of in tight spots in places where you can kind of get into some, well, some tight knit spots. And then you start to throw some tech onto it. Oh, the good old fashioned vibrating foam roller or vibrating foam ball. What does the vibration do? Well, what does the vibration do to anything in a construction site, right like a jackhammer, right? It breaks things up faster. So it allows the movement to be more specifically focused on what you’re going for. If I want to hydrate something, and I want to kind of move fluid in and out, if I put a pulsing of vibration on it, it’s going to facilitate more fluid transfer. It’s also going to neuromuscular li relax somebody as well. We’ll talk about that more later in the video. And then you get to the percussion guns. And now we can get to some real detail change in the heads out, really applying some good force, to places just to speed things up. But let’s not forget that anything works. A football could work, a medicine ball can work, the edge of your counter could work at home, right? We don’t, it doesn’t take fancy tools, but it does take fancy thought. And again, I’m gonna get into that river soon. So just think about this one, right, you want anything to facilitate a pressure change in our fascia? So what should people do to avoid doing fumbling the wrong way, what mistakes are made frequently? Well, frequently Miss made mistakes are using the foam roller, as an example, to actually roll. Rolling is not something that we should do when we’re trying to do myofascial release. If you want to just pump some, some blood to the body, some fluid to the body, kind of a post workout, or pre workout kind of setup, no problem, that’s not a bad technique whatsoever. But if you’re trying to focus, then it rolling or moving out of out of kind of very dynamic. I will say accelerated pace is not something that I recommend doing at all, why it hurts, hurts, and you’re not gonna do something that hurts. And again, I want to go dive into that a little bit deeper. The next thing that people should not do is they should not just grab a tool and drive into the body with as much force as they possibly can. More force is not better, it is not faster. Deep tissue massage does not mean that they are driving as hard as they can into the person’s tissue. So they’re just squinting and fighting. And here’s the key principle behind it. The more I force, something that has its own conscience its own way of kind of kind of dealing with life, the more it’s probably going to force back, meaning if I jump into water at a high rate of velocity, it’s going to hurt a lot more than if I go in slow. Alright, so it works with physics, what about with our own mentality and our own bodily filled water system, right, our bodies filled with water. So I have to go slow, meaning not push too hard, meaning go lighter. And again, I’ll dive into that in our steps of actually how I want you to do it. So those are two big mistakes, people are rolling, and people are pushing too hard. And that because it’s painful, and therefore not only will the physics of it not work very well, but the mentality of it won’t work as well. So now that you know more about what not to do, I’m gonna give you the exact steps that you can follow every single time to foam roll to help release tension. But first drop a line in the comments below if, if you think about certain areas that we should make videos on, on how to actually foam roll, stretch and strengthen, we’d love to hear from it and make content directly towards you. Now, here’s what I want you to do. Again, any tool that you use,
let’s just grab the old fashioned foam roller, and I’m going to go after let’s go to my calves, right I can talk to you look at your kind of dialed this in a little bit more so you can see it. So what I want to do is I want to put my muscle on to the object, whatever it is. And from there, I want to put the appropriate amount of pressure to make my muscle essentially say that’s uncomfortably comfortable. So it’s how much weight I push into it. It’s how much pressure I put into it. If you’re gonna go on a scale of one to 1010 be like stop that is way too much pressure. I’m literally like biting my teeth together. That’s too much. That’s 10 got about a six, five and a half, six and a half seven replicates but go to comfortably uncomfortable, meaning the tissue saying I’m being forced to change but I can manage that change. Now if you can use the the weight of your own limb on your calf, for example, to do that, great go for it, if you need to add more weight, you can do that, if that’s too much too much, you got to think about it, maybe the gravitational weight of your own leg is not enough, maybe you should take it off of gravity, use a different tool that you can maybe physically push into it to make it more appropriate. Right, the amount of positioning that you do is going to be the most important about how to facilitate the most amount of pressure. Again, you may not be able to do that on the ground, it’s too much. That’s okay, go against a wall and pin it against a wall and do the same thing. And I got my foam ball just right right behind me there, the positioning is probably the most important way to think about applying the amount of pressure that is well, uncomfortably comfortable. We want the muscle the fascia to essentially warp around the tool. We don’t want to force it into it. So start lighten start slow. The last point about the amount of pressure that I want you to use is thinking about it also from a start of don’t just put the foam roller somewhere, maybe roll the whole part of the muscle first think about the lateral aspects, the posterior aspects, or the medial aspects, and then say, Okay, where was the worst spot who start there versus going to the first spot, and basically missing out on what be a better session a better, more focused outcome, and getting value for your for your time. Okay, let’s go back to it again. So now you found a comfortably uncomfortable spot, you’re at that level where you can hold there and allow that muscle just start to essentially release. Now I’m saying the word muscle I really mean fascia. But so to keep it simple, from that point, I’m going to just wait, wait, I’m going to do nothing in the beginning. Once I start to feel that muscle go from a six, let’s say to a five, I can actually feel it, I can actually feel it releasing. Bri breathing allows your body to get into a state of just relaxation, basically. But once I start to feel that release, I can maybe present it to go a little faster, I can maybe get a little bit of foot action, maybe a little bit of knee action, I like to move a joint below or joint above just a little bit. I’m not rolling, but I am shifting the muscle. So I’m allowing it to basically floss itself to keep it very, very simple. But I’m getting some basic movement patterns through the muscle, whatever you want to do member you have three planes of motion to choose from, I can go toe left, right, I can spin a toe Long story short, but I don’t want it to peak, the uncomfortable. If I move my calf and it shoots to an eight, that’s not going to help you out that’s going to slow you down. In my opinion, it’s going to slow you down because you’re not in that relaxed state and where you’re fighting back. And a fascial muscle that fights back is not going to give you the results that you want. Remember, you’re gonna spend more time doing it, I wouldn’t want to spend much more time doing this, I want to be doing this very efficiently. So with that being said, there you go a little bit of motion pattern, once it gets to about a two right now to zero, twos good or good enough, you are going to have two options, you can either go deeper and push harder and put more weight on that muscle. Because now that kind of top layer of fascia is now kind of been very what’s been hydrated, basically, now you can go deeper. And what you were the beginning would have been like a 10. Now it’s just a six. Gotta think member fascia and muscle fibers are like a spaghetti bundle, right? There’s fiber within fiber within fiber woven fiber, don’t just get the outside of there get as deep as you possibly can to get as much effect on the fascia because it’s not just on the outer layer, right, it’s layer upon layer upon layer, you want to go as deep as you possibly can with the time that you have available to you. So then you get to the next layer, or you can just go to a new spot and just roll to a higher level or lower level or an inside level or outside level. A quick point on this one not to get too too detailed. But if you can’t achieve a six out of 10, which is huge jumps way up to 789, then don’t go directly on the muscle just kind of nudge against it. Go a little off to the side. Don’t go directly on ground zero. It’s another good strategy to be able to get through something that’s going to be tough to resist. Now, quick question, if that muscle is not releasing, if you’re on your side ribcage and you’re like, Ah, this is the worst I can’t go to the wall with a case I gotta be here. You know, and that’s just not releasing. If in 90 seconds, that muscle does not start to release. Then you’re pushing too hard. You’re pushing too hard. back even if you don’t even if you don’t think you are, you’re pushing too hard, back off to a five whatever the case is right back off a little bit more and Start the clock again, you know that if it’s still interesting back off to a four, honestly, I have not had a single athlete client that that strategy has not worked for. Meaning you may be pushing too hard. And when you’re doing self myofascial release, we tend to push too hard, because we want to go fast. So that’s my quick little process on how to do this. And really make this essentially almost bulletproof. To get great deep effect, without, without the need to hire a massage therapist. I’m not saying don’t do that, right. I’m not saying don’t do that. But if you need a very affordable way to do deep tissue, soft tissue work at home, before workout after workout, and don’t have the means timewise or budget wise to do it, phenomenal resources that these things will last you a lifetime, that are really going to last forever, in a sense, you know, so it’s really thinking about that, and how do you do it appropriately? What’s a good strategy to go through that? And what’s a process you can always bank on? And go back on to see like it remember, do it? Am I doing this right? Am I doing this appropriately. And that’s the cool part about this, you can go deeper and deeper and deeper in time, and allow your body day after day after day to get more and more of this effect of good myofascial tension, and balance. And now if you want to dive deeper and learn more about how to program these types of techniques in your training sessions to help your clients find more efficient movement patterns, head to the description below to learn more about the multi dimensional movement, program mentorship. This is a deep dive. It’s a great opportunity to join a mentorship of of trainers throughout the country, and how we can collectively solve our problems that we’re dealing with our clients in a way that it’s principle based thinking. And if you enjoyed this video, please don’t forget to like and subscribe. And we love to put out new content every single week. So thanks for hanging in there. Appreciate you. See you next time. Cheers.
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