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.

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: