Why Use a Foam Roller?

A foam roller is a good alternative to repetitive trips to the massage therapist.
Running Times

On a Roll
Foam rollers may have reached super star status among athletes. Runner’s World has favorably compared their benefits to those of deep tissue massage. They hang out in the best running stores and health clubs. They’re celebrated by massage and physical therapists. They can be seen in YouTube videos beneath the hamstrings and glutes of attractive models.

The foam roller’s ubiquity has made it obligatory in gyms and any serious athlete’s arsenal of workout equipment. Michael Boyle, best selling author of Functional Training for Sports, has called it “the poor man’s massage therapist.” It’s not hard to see why: rollers are easy to use, reasonably attractive, and almost inviting. They’re part tool, part toy. But can they really give you as good a massage as their proponents claim?

Rolling Off
I recently reexamined my relationship with the foam roller and found to my surprise it is far less effective than other tools available for massage. It’s particularly ineffective on trigger points, those tiny knots that form in your muscles. I used to like foam rollers because they came so highly recommended. While I didn’t experience much benefit from them, I did experience sensation as pain, and reasoned it must be doing some good. I thought surely all the experts who recommend them must be right and my body must be wrong. I figured I wasn’t using it correctly. An entire industry can’t be wrong, can it?

After years of experimenting with them, attending workshops and classes, reading about them, and watching instruction videos, I have to conclude foam rollers just don’t work, at least for me. Trust your body, that’s the lesson here. If you try the foam roller and you find it a dud, it is. If you use it and it works stick with it no matter what I say--you know your body better than I do.

The Point
Here’s why foam rollers aren’t effective massage tools. For a good massage you need to be able to relax. When you get on a foam roller your muscles tense. Massage therapists want their patients to relax during a massage, foam rollers make that all but impossible. Even if you can get past the tension, foam rollers lack precision. Their wide ride covers too much surface area to press into the small knots of muscle that are trigger points. Precision is why needles are used in acupuncture and dry needling to resolve trigger points. But you don’t need needles to dissolve most trigger points and receive the benefits of massage.

For trigger point release, you need a tool that is more precise than a roller and shaped at least in part like a small ball or knob. The roller compresses the whole muscle without offering the offending trigger point the exacting pressure required to release it. The reason rollers are usually recommended as massage tools is the belief that they release trigger points This they fail to do by a wide margin. That is why Clair and Amber Davies in their excellent work, The Trigger Point Workbook, made no mention of them. They recommended tools with knobs and blunt tips like the Theracane, Backnobber II, and the Knobble II. Using a foam roller to activate trigger points may be like using a broom to brush your teeth.

This is the first of a three part series called “Massage Tools that Work”