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.
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.
 | The appropriate amount of pressure to use for a massage is something that Hippocrates made clear almost 2,500 years ago. In my book, What Would Hippocrates Say?, I quote Galen, the famous physician to Emperor Marcus Aurelius, on this very subject: "... rub with the bare hands, which are midway between hard and soft, so that the body may be neither contracted and constricted nor relaxed and dilated more than is desirable, but may be kept within the bounds of nature" (Galen, Hygiene). |
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.
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