Foam Rolling

The Foam Roller

By Jack Nuske

13/09/2023

Ah, the wonderful cylindrical tube of torture. Usually familiar to those who are always feeling tight, stiff, inflexible or any other term you may relate to a lack of mobility. Foam rolling is a popular bit of exercise equipment in physiotherapy due to its wide range of uses.

But as you’re grimacing (and internally cursing the physio who prescribed it) while rolling over a certain muscle, have you ever wondered why we physios love to give it?

In short, the reason is to help relieve that feeling of tightness described above and often provides some degree of pain relief afterwards. Some claim that this is due to lengthening of connective tissue/fascia, or breaking down tissue “adhesions” - which simply isn’t backed by enough quality evidence for the debate to end there.

There is another theory which I like quite a lot: the “pain” caused while foam rolling acts to overpower the “injury pain”. That’s the injury pain that the body/brain responds to naturally by guarding or creating compensatory behaviours (i.e., limping).

There’s a few years of university level pain neuroscience behind those two sentences (which is a can of worms I won’t be delving into). Essentially, the de-escalating, good pain of foam rolling suppresses the injury pain for a short while and allows us to move the area more easily. And this is why I call it “release work”, as it releases the affected muscles from the body’s natural reaction to pain to let us get into other kinds of exercises; exercises that then create the desired effects we’re after.