It seems like almost everyone is doing self-massage these days, using foam rollers, etc to massage their tissues. This is a great trend, helping a lot of people prevent and manage problems. But there is one aspect of this trend that is really bad: people are turning to harder and harder object to use for their self-massage. This is a really bad idea and it's leading to a lot of unnecessary injuries.

The Lacrosse ball is the best example of this terrible trend. It has become very popular to use a Lacrosse ball to do self-massage. But Lacrosse balls are so hard that they are essentially a rock. The body should not be massaged with a rock!

The mistake people are making is the common idea that if some is good, then more must be better. If a little pressure is good, then a lot must be better. The idea is to upgrade from the wimpy pressure to the heroic pressure as a sign of progress. But when it comes to massage, this is not the case. I often give people a tennis ball to massage the bottom of their feet. Soon the feet would feel better, and almost invariably the patient would suggest that they now "graduate" to a golf ball, since the tennis ball no longer made the feet hurt. But the point of massage is to relax the tissues, not to make them hurt. If it no longer hurts to use a tennis ball, that's great! We don't need to keep adding pressure just so that it will hurt. Pain is not the goal; relaxation of the tissue is. Try to burn this statement into your brain so that you don't make the same mistake that so many people are making these days.

From now on, when you do self-massage (which is a great thing to do!), please treat your body well while you do so. Rolling the body on a rock is not a good idea! Use Lacrosse balls to play Lacrosse. Save your golf balls for the golf course. Tennis balls and standard basic white foam rollers, on the other hand, make great tools for self-massage. They, like the palms of the hands, provide just the right amount of pressure to help the body without hurting it. They are not rocks, and so they are perfectly fine to roll on.

The point is that moderation is key. We need to do some exercise, but we certainly don't need to train like athletes if health is our aim. This should be great news for everyone! Those who do too much can take it easy, and those who do too little don't need to take on some major burden of exercise.

Finding the moderate point is what Hippocrates repeatedly tries to encourage in his writings. He has powerful, ancient wisdom toward this end. He is the voice of moderation, and he can help us find a moderate exercise regimen that will work for all of us. Those who do to much, prepare to be convinced to do less, and those who do too little, prepare to be encouraged to be a bit more active.

In my new book What Would Hippocrates Say?, I describe Hippocrates' plan to keep us healthy, giving a detailed regimen for exercising, massaging, bathing, eating, and sleeping the way Hippocrates recommends. Here's a short excerpt from my book:

It is amazing that the ancient Greeks, writing in the 400's BC, discussed diet and exercise as being the keys to health. We in the modern world have only realized the importance of diet and exercise in the last 50 years or so! They are way ahead of us on these topics. Hippocrates has thousands of years of ancient health practices to share with us. Here's one of his great quotes: "For food and exercise, while possessing opposite qualities, yet work together to produce health. For it is the nature of exercise to use up material, but of food and drink to make good deficiencies."

Spend a moment reflecting on how you exercise. Are you an over-exerciser or an under-exerciser? Either way, how can you move toward a more moderate regimen? Hint: If you're an over-exerciser, then the answer isn't to add new activities, but to remove some, and if you're an under-exerciser, then the answer is to get a little more exercise into your life. If you want some sage advice from someone who guided Western health practices for thousands of years, try reading What Would Hippocrates Say? This was a book born from my own fascination with how much these ancient people knew about being healthy and how wise their advice is. While reading Hippocrates, I quickly noticed that I was a severe over-exerciser who was brutalizing myself for no good reason. Hippocrates saved me from a lot of future aches and pains, and I'm convinced that he can do the same for everyone, under-exercisers and over-exercisers alike.

If the forearms don't turn, then the stress goes down into the wrist and hand, or up into the elbow, shoulder, and neck (even sometimes into the low back). For this reason, we're going to focus on the forearms this month.

Tight forearms are almost always due to tight muscles in the forearms, and tight muscles in the forearms are either too cold or too dry. At least, that's how Hippocrates (ca 460 BC), the Father of Medicine, would have looked at it. Cold tissues are frozen, unable to move, and dry tissues are hard tissues that refuse to soften to allow motion. Cold tissues need to be warmed, while dry tissues need to be moistened. If your forearms are tight, consider whether they are cold, dry, or a combination of cold and dry:

1) Cold forearms: Cold forearms usually feel cold, or at least don't feel warm to the touch. They can usually move through a reasonable range of motion, but they feel weak and uncoordinated when they do so. To warm forearms that are too cold, you can use exercise or massage. Exercise heats the tissues by pumping blood into them, and massage heats the tissues by rubbing them. Both are useful for overcoming cold forearms. Squeezing a tennis ball is a simple way to exercise and thereby warm the forearms. Massaging the forearms with some oil can be very helpful to add warmth. You don't have to press hard. It's the pressure and movement of the massage that warms the tissues.

2) Dry forearms: Dry forearms usually feel tight when stretched and feel hard when touched. The tissues are stiff. Dry muscles are also easily fatigued. When exercised, they tire quickly. Dry forearms respond best to gentle massage with oil. The oil is moistening and the gentle pressure helps to soften the hard tissues. This is very important: hard massage hardens tissues and soft massage softens tissues. So if your forearms feels hard, then soft massage is best. A word of warning: lots of exercise and long massages are both drying. They will make dry forearms worse. Dry forearms are often caused excessive amounts of exercise. I once dried my forearms out by putting together furniture for eight hours straight. And I have to be constantly careful about drying out my forearms because I used them all day in my work. Doing things weren't not used to doing for excessive amounts of time is the most common way to dry out a tissue.

3) Cold and dry forearms: Cold and dry forearms show a combination of both cold and dry problems: the forearms are both cold and hard to the touch, they are weak and easily fatigued in exercise, and they are stiff and tight when stretched. We need to be a bit careful with forearms that are both cold and dry because exercise is not only heating but also drying. It's fine to do some tennis ball squeezes, but we don't want to tire out the forearms, leaving them even more dry. Short but frequent gentle massage with oil is the key for the cold and dry forearms. The massage will heat the tissues, the oil will moisten the tissues, and the gentle pressure will help to soften the tissues. The difference between our regimen for dry forearms versus cold and dry forearms is that cold and dry forearms should be exercised a bit (but not at all excessively) and should be massaged more frequently to help to keep the tissues warm.

Try tending your forearms this month and see what it does for your arms and your entire body.

My upcoming book is called What Would Hippocrates Say? It is about the 2500 year-old wisdom of the ancient health practitioners of our Western heritage, a wisdom that has been essentially ignored in modern times. This tradition dates back to Hippocrates in 460 BC who said:

The importance of this statement is immense! The truth that diet and exercise are vitally important for our health has only recently been rediscovered in the last few decades. Hippocrates, writing 2500 years ago, was already telling people that diet and exercise were the keys to health. We've lost a lot by not listening to this ancient wisdom.

This tradition has much in common with other ancient health practices such as Traditional Chinese Medicine, but it is also very unique. It carries the weight of European history and is a major part of the foundation of our modern world. We would be wise to heed some of their ancient advice. Today, I want to share one of the ancient methods for preventing head colds.

Even here in southern California, the winter is a cold and moist time. The cold and moist weather affects the head and can easily cause the fluids in the head to thicken and congeal, leading to a head cold. If we can keep the fluids warm and thin, then we will be far less likely to end up with a cold.

One way to warm and thin the fluids in the head is to gargle with mustard. Place about a teaspoon of ground mustard in a cup and fill it with about 1/2 cup of water. Swirl it around so that the mustard is evenly mixed into the water, and then gargle with this for about 20 seconds before spitting it out. According to the ancient tradition, mustard is a hot and dry herb which helps to overcome the cold and moist weather, keeping the fluids in our heads thin and less likely to congeal into a head cold. You'll probably find that you need to blow your nose a bit after doing this, but that's a good thing. It's keeping the fluids thin and runny, instead of allowing them to create blockages.

None of this is to negate the idea of a virus causing a cold. We can imagine this as a way to make our heads less hospitable to viruses. Warmer and thinner mucus is harder for viruses to make into a home.

This mustard gargle is just one of the many ancient ideas worthy of our attention. People did this for centuries to prevent colds.

Soft tissue work has become very popular. Everyone is rolling on foam rollers these days, and rightfully so. Keeping your soft tissues mobile is one of the most important things that you can do to keep your body moving well. But there’s a new fad that is spoiling the benefits of soft tissue work: using a Lacrosse ball.

Rolling on a standard foam roller and using a tennis ball to knead your own muscles is great. The pressure from these two objects provides a safe and very effective mobilizing force. But if a little is good, more is not necessarily better! There is a new fad of using harder and harder objects to rip into the soft tissue, and the Lacrosse ball is the most popular of these objects. Rolling on a tennis ball is like getting a massage from someone who knows what they’re doing, someone who provides the right amount of pressure to help the tissues to move better without causing them harm in the process. But rolling on a Lacrosse ball is like rolling on a rock! It’s like getting a massage from a wrecking ball! The Lacrosse ball is way too hard of an object to use for self-massage. It bruises the muscles, irritates the tendons, rips the fascia, and hurts the bone.

Years ago, before the fad of the Lacrosse ball had become popular, I had to talk many of my patients out of the idea of ‘graduating’ from using a tennis ball to using a golf ball for self-massage. I would give my patients who suffered from plantar fasciitis a tennis ball on which to roll their feet, and almost without fail they’d come back feeling much better. But they’d also usually come back with the idea of ‘upgrading’ from a tennis ball to a golf ball. The idea was that if the tennis ball no longer makes the tissues hurt, then we’ve got to find something harder that will still make them hurt. But the nice thing about a tennis ball is that if it doesn’t hurt anymore, then the tissues probably aren’t tight anymore. ‘Graduating’ from a tennis ball means that we don’t need to do as much soft tissue work anymore, because the tissues are now reasonably supple. We don’t need to press harder just to keep making it hurt. Pain is not the point of self-massage, the relaxation of the tissue is the point.

The point of self-massage is to relax the muscles, not to make them hurt. If they hurt when pressed with a tennis ball, then they're probably too tight. If they don't hurt when pressed with a tennis ball, then they probably aren't too tight. Try to burn these statements into your mind.

We all have this idea that if pressure is good, then more pressure must be better. But that’s simply not the case. In my newest book, What Would Hippocrates Say?, I quote Galen, the physician for the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius and one of the great father's of medicine: