No, this is not a post about how great that 5 gum is. Its about Why do we foam roll???
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| so true |
Foam rolling is a techniques to stimulate your muscles. Specifically through diffuse noxious inhibitory control.
We can stimulate our muscles in a variety of ways, one way is through pain/nociception, via ‘mashing’ them with lacrosse balls and foam rolls thereby producing a short term effect known as diffuse noxious inhibitor control. Diffuse noxious inhibitory control (DNIC) is one of several varieties of “descending modulation”, by which the brain alters the amount of nociception (pain) signal coming in. Basically you're tricking your body to listen to another signal louder. The other signal being the tenderness from the foam roll.
Your brain gets a lot of data (noise) from the body and the outside world (and we mean A LOT; like Billions of input) and it needs to pick out the appropriate information (signal) to listen to. The information that is most worthwhile from a protective and self-preservation aspect gets priority. This is why your not constantly getting information that your legs are touching the denim or cotton from your pants from all the sensory inputs on your skin; because its not a priority. (I hope you're wearing pants when you read this blog!) So what gets priority? Pain signals gets priority, because it typically is trying to tell you something is wrong and potentially life threatening. Just like a crying newborn can't tell you its hungry, your body uses pain to tell you something is wrong because it hasn't figured out to tell you specifically its the L5 posterolateral nucleus pulposus or a dysfunctional quadratus lumborum. (That would make our job easy wouldn’t it!).
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| that's a lot of data |
So if you put in a new pain signal, the body will pick up on that and not the old pain signal. DNIC means that the brain limits or stops other nociceptive signals (like the patient’s complaint of pain) from traveling up the spinal cord to the brain. So if we use a foam roll or similar apparatus ( I suggest wine bottle: tell your patients to drink up during and when the bottle is empty I can assure near full pain relief) than we are overloading the brain with so much “good” pain noise that it will focus its signal on that sensation rather than the other nociceptive input and release some new pain relieving endorphins for the new signal. Todd Hargrove from Better Movement gives a great explanation: “So here is the story I tell about foam rolling. You put a foam roller into your butt and create some significant nociceptive signalling. The brain receives it and says something like: “OK, the butt is telling me that there is some danger down there right now. But I happen to know that this is a therapeutic situation because my trainer said so. So, let’s send some drugs down the spinal cord to block all this talk about danger. And, we’ll make this feel like a “good” pain, not an injury.” The drugs reduce pain and thereby improve movement temporarily.”
Foam rolling can create pain relief. People also tend have additional mobility, which could easily be explained by suppression of nociceptive activity, which “tends to create muscle guarding, stiffness, and compensatory patterns of movement.” Further, the results of foam rolling are often temporary and need to be repeated (and often repeated harder the next time- are people becoming addicted to the drug cabinet in the brain?) This suggests DNIC as well.
Pain relief and improved motion via DNIC give the patient an opportunity to make a longer lasting effect. According to Harrison, typically just 15-20 minutes. If you are feeling better only for this short time is still provides enough time to train movements that would not normally be accessible, learn new motor skills, develop new work capacities, and reduce the perceived threat associated with certain movements. This training would have longer benefit.
This is why foam rolling may be most beneficial as part of your dynamic warm up, and not needed for your cool down. Further, foam rolling will not be enough without reinforcing new range or motor control skills (or hopefully both). Take for example a warm up for Deadlift/Hip Hinge workout or running. You may want to spend a little time foam rolling the hamstrings:
But this will only be useful if we reset correct motor control (SL hooked bridge) and retrain the new tone/end range:
Honestly, Foam rolling is NOT my favorite “reset”. I think there's other ways to get better data to the brain along with getting more of a healing process going and a truer neuro-physiological change. You can provide useful data outside of pain, such as proprioception (I’ll cover soon), working at end range, mobilization and manipulation, and even breath control. But some people love mashing themselves to death and I figure they should at least know why they go through all the torture.
