Foam Roller Mistake! (Watch BEFORE You Foam Roll)

Make no mistakes with your workouts…train like an athlete

so you finally listened and added the foam roller as part of your routine but what if I told you that this right here could be caused you more problems than you had that made you reach forward in the first place I’ll explain it all [Music] today what’s up guys Jeff Cavalier affen x. com the foam roller it’s how I roll right we’ve heard that phrase before but never has it been more true than it will be by the time you’re done watching this video how you foam roll means more than the fact that you’re just foam rolling alone okay because doing foam rolling in the wrong way can actually be more detrimental to what you were even doing it for in the first place in order to understand that guys I wanted to start by drawing a little bit here for you first of all this is the side view of somebody’s leg and butt over here but we’re going to get back to that one second cuz first and foremost the way that fascia and muscles work together is the fascia is what overlies the the muscle belly and it sort of works in this type of way okay it’s sort of like a diamond shape and if you were to push on these ends right this way then these two are going to get further apart if you think about I’ll show a picture here those um those uh Chinese finger uh traps right if you ever had your fingers in these things you try to pull them out what’s happening is you try to pull is these parts just get closer together it makes it harder for you to pull your fingers out of meanwhile the way to get out of that is to actually push your fingers closer together that makes expand in this direction and then your fingers can get out fasion Works in much the same way so again if you were to push this direction in this direction okay then these would go out to the side all right so now realizing how that fashion Works let’s take it over to a real world example that a lot of you guys I’m sure could uh relate to we’re talking about here the IT band and for those guys that don’t know exactly what that is it’s that big stretch of of uh tendonous structure that goes down the outside of your leg that will a lot of times result in pain especially for runners guys who do a lot of biking even people who sit for long periods of time you get that pain characteristically right on the outside of your knee okay right above that bony the bump right on the outside of your knee this guys beyond the scope of this video the IT band is really sort of being just put in the middle of a lot of different muscles that that attached into this tendon and what we have here is two at the top and two at the bottom I won’t even talk about the two at the bottom for now those are really the anterior tip and the uh pronus longest down at the bottom but again just for now understand that we have our tensor fascia which starts from here and we have our glute Max that starts from here and you can see they both feed into this right here IT band now here’s the really important point when it comes to the foam roller guys will just blanketly take out the foam roller as they’ve been instructed and start rolling away thinking that they’re doing a good job the problem is again it bands get flared up because of this imbalance between the pull of all four muscles that are feeding into it so if we look at the tensor fashion this is more on the front side this is more on the hip flexion side this is the one that tends to get short and tight the problem is in Balance here in the back the glutes tend to the glute Max tends to get long and weak now if you think about how we talked about how muscle faster reacts to foam rolling basically if you are to go in the direction of the fibers here okay if I were to go back and forth this way you’re basically increasing the length here of the muscle belly okay and then narrowing it so in this case all you’re doing is taking a long weak muscle the glutes and making them longer that is not an indication for why you’d be using the foam roller if however you took the short tensor fashion and you rolled in the direction of the fibers you would be taking a shorter tight muscle and increasing its length that’s a good thing but you can see that the direction of the foam roller makes all the difference if you just said I’m going to blanketly roll this thing up up and down my leg one you could be creating a benefit the other you could be furthering a problem so when it comes to something especially like the IT band and the same thing applies down below the knee if you’re going to just blanketly roll over these muscles thinking that you’re stretching this thing out or improving the tissue quality I can tell you right now you’re not you have to have a bit more of a specific approach to what you’re doing uh than that so if I break out the foam roller here you can see that again with the glute max if I was going to take this foam roller and roll it in this direction right this is in the direction of the fibers down like that across the hip which is what a lot of guys will do you see them all the time they get on the thing and they roll it right across that’s only making the situation worse if I wanted to try to tighten that a little bit obviously first and foremost strength training is going to be our best weapon to try to tighten and add some tone to that uh to that glute Max okay because again I always talk about glute Amnesia that’s definitely going on in most people we could roll in this direction okay which would be against the direction of the fibers so if we did that that would basically stretch it out this way right which would pull it in this way based on this method over here right so if we do this it pulls it in that would actually give us a little bit more of a benefit what we looking for so glute Max don’t roll This Way roll that way tfl again this muscle goes straight up and down so if we go in the direction of that muscle group right there Then basically we are going to increase its length from top to bottom that’s what we’re looking for some guys I’ll see they say I want to take this foam roller and roll it right against my leg over here like this and just roll it right over the whole leg cuz I want to feel it the whole time that’s wrong if you do that all you’re doing is sort of helping to shorten the structure that’s already short and tight so again guys it makes a difference as I always say everything makes a difference how you train what you eat the way you sequence your reps the way you sequence your sets anything written on paper looks good until it’s put in practice and could become really bad real quickly okay that’s why it could be any workout program could be any recommendation of foam roll anything that looks good on paper done incorrectly can be pretty bad so guys start doing taking a little bit more that second level approach or step to what you’re doing and uh I’m telling you you’ll you’ll start to see much faster uh results and also uh a more significant step towards the direction you’re actually trying to achieve in the first place in this case looser uh and a better feel feeling it band guys if you haven’t already and you want to take that second step with me being your coach along the way then head to athletics. com right now and grab your 90-day training program see what it’s like to train like an athlete and to address these things as if it was your career like an athlete where all these things matter all right guys I’ll see you there in the meantime let me know what other types of problems do you suffer from if you want I can make that other video talking about the lower half of this from the ankle up and how that contributes to it ban as well or other issues that are B and you maybe we can discuss them here as we do sometimes with our PT type videos all right guys I’ll talk to you soon [Music]