Almost all trainees want to get stronger and build muscle. Almost all trainees want a body that looks and feels great. Imagine spending hundreds of dollars on gym memberships – that’s dedication, right?
How quickly an injury can derail it all.
Most average trainees focus solely lifting weights and getting as much muscle as they can. But a closer look can reveal muscle filled with scar tissue and trigger points (aka knots). Without proper rehab, these kind of issues can quickly manifest themselves in poor technique, pain, and injury.
With a little bit of effort and help from your local sporting goods store, we can make an enormous difference in just weeks.
All we need is a tennis ball.
Soft-Tissue Therapy
Everyone in the gym was looking.
The first time I tried soft-tissue work with a tennis ball, I let out grunts of pain and suffering… and I think I may have shed a tear. In other words, it was obvious that I had all sorts of problems with my muscle that was slowly hurting my body mobility, strength, and health. At that time, I frequently suffered from some very common problems:
– Lower back pain
– Knee pain
– Shin splints
Soft-tissue work focuses on breaking up scar tissue and releasing trigger points found in your muscles. Trigger points are areas of the muscle where the fibers are in continuous contraction – this detracts from the muscle’s flexibility and mobility. And in a body where the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone, and the hip bone’s connected to the back bone, an issue in one area can easily lead to problems elsewhere.
Conventional stretching merely lengthens the muscle – it doesn’t improve its quality. Soft-tissue therapy is necessary to fix the problem. A quick warning: the first few times will hurt – this just exposes how much your muscle needs it. Keep poking this beast. It will improve.
I Have Pain In My ___________
Here are some things to look for with common pains:
– Knee pain. Oftentimes caused by problems in the peroneals and illiotibial (IT) band. Use the tennis ball and you might some extremely tender spots in those areas. That limits mobility in the ankle and hip, forcing your knee to overcompensate.
– Lower back pain. The full monty, in my opinion. You will find tightness and tender areas in the psoas, tensor fascia lata (TFL), IT band, glutes and their connecting muscles, hip flexors, and much more.
– Shin splints. Caused by improper ankle mobility. There could be tenderness in the calves as well as the peroneals.
Let’s Get The Ball Rolling
Here’s a great video that shows the different ways to release your muscles.
Although he uses a foam roller for many of the exercises, you can simply replace it with a tennis ball. However, if you go to a gym that has a foam roller, feel free to use it. A tennis ball just adds specificity to the therapy as well as more pressure (and costs much much less).
For those with access to a foam roller, start your workouts by laying on it with the length of your spine along the length of the foam roller. This does a great job of decompressing the spine and opening up front of your body, counteracting hours of hunching over the computer.
Lift hard. Lift happy.
Now that we are ridding ourselves of nagging pains, we can refocus on improving strength and building quality muscle. That wasn’t so bad, now was it?
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