Written by Nic Bartolotta
If you walk into any sporting event, training room, or even your local gym, you’ll see people rolling around the floor on foam rollers. You’ve probably even tried it yourself. And though it’s an important part of athletic performance, most people don’t even know why.
Foam rolling is one of the most effective muscle recovery methods available to athletes. When done properly, the physical benefits include reduced muscle soreness, shorter recovery times, fewer injuries, and more flexibility. Not to mention, it can reduce mental tension caused by lingering injuries or chronic tightness.
But before we explore all of the benefits of foam rolling, let’s break down exactly how it works.
What is foam rolling?
Foam rolling is a form of self-myofascial release, which involves applying pressure to certain muscles and connective tissues with a foam roller. The benefits of foam rolling are largely disputed, but most medical professionals agree that it releases tension, reduces soreness, and promotes muscle recovery.
Foam rolling mimics a deep tissue massage, one usually performed by a licensed therapist or sports massage therapist. But instead of spending time & money on an expensive massage, you can reap the benefits by yourself while at home, in the gym, and even on the road.
How does foam rolling work?
Most people have a basic understanding of how the muscular and skeletal systems of the human body work. Your brain sends a signal to the relevant muscles to contract, which pulls the bone along with it.
Consider your arm. When you want to do a bicep curl, your bicep contracts to bend your forearm & wrist up towards your chest. To relax the muscle, you engage your triceps to lower your arm and the weight back down towards your waist. This process is uniform for every movement that you perform on a daily basis; from walking to standing up and even brushing your teeth, this is how your muscles work. And unless you’re using your non-dominant arm or leg, your muscle memory performs these movements without you having to think about them at all.
What you probably didn’t know is that none of this would be possible without fascia, the connective tissue that encases your muscles, bones, tendons, cartilage, nerves and blood vessels. It also shapes your muscles and helps your body move by connecting muscles to tendons & bones.
Most of the time, fascia is nothing to worry about. But when your muscles are injured, sore, tight, or recovering from a major trauma, it can cause problems. As your body responds to an injury or inflammation, the fascia tightens up and binds to the muscle.
This causes adhesions, or trigger points, to form. These adhesions are areas where the fascial tissue is especially tight, limiting your ability to stretch, contract, and engage a certain muscle. If you’ve ever been sore in a particular spot after a workout or experienced lingering pain after a muscle cramp, those specific areas are trigger points.
And instead of waiting for the pain & tightness to subside, you can foam roll the pain away. When your muscles are healthy and limber, the fascial tissue glides alongside your muscle, enabling you to move without limitation. But when adhesions form, the fascia locks up. And the only way to release the knot is by foam rolling the muscle and massaging the fascia.
But this self-massage technique does more than just break up muscle adhesions. Here are 5 benefits of foam rolling that you can’t ignore if you want to train and recover like a pro.
5 benefits of foam rolling that will help you train harder and live healthier
1. Reduce muscle soreness
Professional athletes, gym goers, and weekend warriors know the feeling of muscle soreness all too well. A day or two after intense physical activity, your quads and hamstrings start to tighten up, making it difficult to walk or even sit down. This is called delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), and it’s your body’s natural inflammatory response.
In a perfect world, you could exercise as hard as you want and your body would recover instantly. But that’s not how muscle growth works; they must first be broken down before they recover and eventually grow.
One of the primary benefits of foam rolling is that it can significantly improve your muscle recovery, thereby reducing the duration and severity of DOMS. By releasing the trigger points, foam rolling promotes blood flow and reduces tension in the sore area, aiding the body’s healing abilities.
2. Shorten recovery times between workouts
Muscle soreness can last for days. But you don’t have days. You have 24 hours, maybe less, before your next run, workout, or game. And if your muscles are still recovering from the previous day, you won’t be able to perform at a high level.
Not only does it aid muscle recovery, but it helps it occur at a faster rate. This means you can recover after long, intense exercise and still make it to the gym the next day for round 2.
Foam rolling shortens recovery times by reducing post-exercise fatigue, soreness, and stiffness. For best results, you should foam roll both before and after each workout. A pre-roll session before the gym or practice will prepare your body for dynamic movements, reduce the likelihood of injury, and improve your physical performance. Afterwards, treat your muscles to another foam rolling session to kickstart the recovery process, prevent cramps, and obviously, shorten your recovery time.
3. Increase flexibility & range of motion (ROM)
It’s no secret that tight muscles are more prone to injury than limber muscles. So if you struggle with chronic tightness from poor posture, stress, or over-training, foam rolling is the solution you’ve been looking for.
We’ve covered that foam rolling helps break down myofascial adhesions, helping to reduce soreness and restore a full ROM. But studies show that a combination of foam rolling and static stretching can actually increase ROM beyond the baseline. So “foam rolling won’t just help you touch your toes again; it will help lengthen your muscles even further so that you can put your entire palm on the floor” says Nic Bartolotta, MPT, HHP.
As you improve your muscle and joint flexibility over time, you’ll likely experience added benefits like:
- Fewer injuries
- Better posture and balance
- Greater strength, speed, and explosiveness
- Improved physical performance.
And as long as you continue to foam roll and stretch as needed, these added benefits will compound on each other.
4. Treat & manage injuries or other chronic conditions
Whether you’re an Olympic athlete or a recreational athlete, injuries happen to everyone. And though they may keep you away from the game for a while, foam rolling can help you treat and manage injuries so that you can get back out there.
Foam rolling stimulates blood flow to the target muscles, resulting in benefits like:
- The release of endorphins, natural pain-relieving chemicals produced by the body
- Reduced swelling and inflammation
- Increased flow of healing nutrients to the damaged joint, muscle, and/or tissue
- The prevention of adhesions and scar tissue buildup, helping to maintain flexibility ROM even as you recover
- The treatment of chronic, seemingly unavoidable injuries like runner’s knee, tennis elbow, and shin splints
So instead of “taking it easy” for the next few weeks, you can accelerate your recovery time and treat painful injuries on every part of your body.
If you’re using it to treat injuries, always avoid rolling directly over injured muscles, tendons, and joints – this will worsen your injury. Instead, foam roll the area above, below, and opposite the problem area. This will alleviate tension in the surrounding area, allowing the inflamed area to relax and heal.
5. Reduce your risk of injury
Foam rolling helps reduce muscle soreness, increase muscle & joint flexibility, and enhances muscle activation. All of these things help prevent injuries.
Foam rolling before a game won’t keep you from getting hurt; sometimes accidents happen. But a consistent foam rolling routine will increase the strength and elasticity of your muscles, reducing your risk of injury. You’ll have the benefit of staying healthy while others complain of pulled muscles, strains, and cramps.
The benefits of foam rolling are difficult to quantify. But if you ask any one of the NBA, MLB, NFL, or NHL athletes we work with, they’ll tell you that the Rolflex foam roller is essential to their success. It helps them stay injury-free, recover quickly after long road trips, and operate at peak performance, even as the other athletes try to manage this pain by sitting out of important practices and games.
And if you want to train, play, and recover like the best athletes in the world, you need to add foam rolling to your daily fitness routine.