Hi all,

My whole life I've been carrying LOTS of tension within my body, without even realizing it (until recently that is). Among other things, this led to terrible breathing patterns which, I can see now, fueled constantly high levels of anxiety. The anxiety, in turn, leads to more muscular tension, less room to breathe, more anxiety...

Yoga helped me realize that although my body looked very limber, it was anything but. However, it was of limited help in fixing the problem. Whether you call it yoga or just stretching, assuming you start it at a point in your life where every part of your body works the way it is supposed to, all is great.

However, if that's not the case (and it's not for many adults), stretching alone won't free a muscle that's all bundled up and full of adhesions. Now that's where the foam roller (or lots of deep tissue massage, if you have the $$) comes to the rescue.

After several months of using this basic device, I feel like I live in a new body. The muscles have literally rearranged themselves and, for the first time in my life, I can feel what deep breathing is all about. Although i found out about diaphragmatic breathing a while ago, the tightness of the muscle surrounding the thoracic cage never allowed me to do it (so I was basically just faking it, inflating my belly but still breathing with my chest as always).

Now the good part: just as the bad breathing led to more tension, the good breathing promotes relaxation. Also, the yoga poses feel completely different now vs before I started working with the foam roller.

Bottom line is, if any of you guys feels like you might be dealing with such issues, it's definitely worth spending the $10 and giving this a try. Btw, i discovered the foam roller accidentally, after seeing one lying around at the gym. Even though I had been on asthma medication for years (thus many chest examinations) not one doctor mentioned how awful my breathing technique was.

I so wish I knew about this sooner, but no one ever recommended it to me, so that's why I'm posting this now ))

Thankyou very much!

It definitely makes a huge difference. Imagine tripping with all the tight bundled muscles vs. tripping with loose limber muscles, a world of difference

Congrats on your discovery.

Yes, one's experience of the body changes completely. Looking back, I realize that i've always had tight muscles (not to be confused with toned), and always had the anxiety (even as kid, when i certainly had no reasons to be anxious). Regardless of which occurred first, they certainly reinforced each other over the years, and having had them both for as long as i can remember (even though i wasn't aware of it until now), I just assumed that my body was built like that.

This sort of rather dramatic shift in something I've always taken for granted makes me wonder if we really have any idea about how others experience the world. I mean, take 2 guys seating at the beach, both smiling on a sunny summer day. One is tight and anxious (but not particularly aware of it),the other relaxed, and they both think of themselves as just normal, since they've always been in their respective states.

And that's why trying to cheer up people by telling them that the sun is shining doesn't usually work ))

Sounds really interesting! Would you recommend a hard foam roller?

PS: I don't care about pain, but maximum gain.

I agree its interesting. I would like to hear how you work with the roller and also what kind of roller are you using ? Thank you

Hi all,

Gym people will jump straight on the hardest roller they can find, but I think a lot of it is part of the macho display. I did what everyone else was doing and started with the highest density roller, but in my experience, after a while that only moves the knots around. I see people just move and forth on those things and, while that might relieve some tension fast, it's not going to work on old adhesions.

Same thing with pain: there seems to be this assumption that the more, the better. The pain may be more acute if you hit certain points, but for general rolling all over the body, i find that if I go beyond a mild level of discomfort, the muscle won't release at all.

On the same note, if your body is really tight and you use a hard roller, it may not hurt at all and you may mistakenly believe that you don't need the rolling. However, in my case, working with the hard roller didn't hurt because the muscles were so tight they didn't release at all against the unfriendly surface.

The way I do it is by trying to "breath" into the muscles. That is, you let your body sink into the foam and focus on relaxing that muscle. At first you may think that just because you're not consciously contracting it, the muscle is fully relaxed, but you'll be surprised when the tension actually starts being released.

Once you go past the most superficial level, it's not really about sticking something into the muscles to separate the fibers, but more about applying just the right amount of pressure (you'll feel what that is when you do it) to allow the muscle to release on its own (whatever the mechanism of that is).

Now I mostly use a soft (white) roller and a tennis ball for a more spot oriented approach. After the foam rolling, I go through a series of (mostly yoga inspired) stretches to pull the newly untangled fibers into place.

On this note, it also helps if you learn a bit about the human body and how the various layers of muscles relate to each other. For example, on your back there are 5 or 6 layers and the way the shoulder joint works is not exactly intuitive. Nonetheless, many people will just go at the gym and work on whatever they see in the mirror, sometimes severely compromising their bodies abilities to function the way they're designed to. The body will adapt, but the adaptation may lead to all sort of issues down the road.

I think that's also to say about plain existence, I had no idea what is possible before trying those agonist substances. I feel bad about people that have no idea what kind of being is actually possible. I was one of them. We are so diverse. Also IMO substances are not necessary, but they do change the world view of deeply unaware/auto people.

I also have anxiety/tension problems, far less than I used to, though. I first discovered my tension by the help of cannabis, it relaxed me beyond anything I could imagine, didn't help so much in everyday life, but I think it is amazing tool in the right hands and could help some people to cope with the problem. At least I began trying to relax as often as I can and I think there's a lot of difference now.

Various substances do allow one to directly experience, for a little while, some mental states that might be natural to other people. To a degree, that's nice, and it allows for greater empathy. On the other hand, it may interfere with one's ability to "defend" their default personality.

Say you're feeling down and depressed: an upper that's potent enough will pull you right out of the hole to the point where depression won't even make sense to you, even though you were just there... Now that may help you see how someone who has never experienced it won't understand what you feel like on a regular basis, but it also shows the futility of trying to explain it.

Weed and benzos both help, but they both cloud the mind as well and the body builds tolerance fast. The ability to link the nasty, diffuse sensation of anxiety with a more concrete thing like body tension helps one stay grounded.

In western medicine it's somehow taken for granted that psychological issues have to do with stuff that's going on in the head and nowhere else. Then you have the random yoga instructor telling you that stress is stored in the hips and shoulders, but there's so much metaphorical nonsense in the usual yoga talk that no one really takes it seriously (apart from maybe trying to feel vaguely inspired by it).

However, when the body is relaxed enough to begin with, one can actually feel certain parts tensing up when anxiety inducing events take place. In my experience, the shoulder and hip area are, indeed, particularly affected. I actually read somewhere that raising the shoulders is part of the flight or fight mechanism and just occurs unconsciously whenever one is under stress.

So I've got a soft foam roller as to your recommendation and started using it. It feels nice so far and i definetly have painfully tense spots on my neck and just above my hips. How often do you use it? Can you do it everyday or is it too much for the muscles to bear?

Thanks for the tip though, enjoying it...:=)

You can do it all day, everyday -the stiffer your body is at the moment, the more benefits you'll get. But ultimately it's a massage, and your muscles are hopefully enjoying it (if they don't, try to find out where the problem is).

I was pretty stiff when i first started working with a foam roller, so I sometimes did it for hours on end. It was then when I checked to see if there where any dangers associated with the activity and couldn't find any.

In my experience, a short session will only relieve superficial tension, like that accumulated during a workout at the gym. For something more similar to a deep tissue massage, you have to spend some time on the roller, trying to relax/stretch.

Also have you heard of Trauma Release Exercise? Great for relieving daily stress, anxiety, muscle tension and buried trauma.

Uses a series of exercises to cause the muscles to tremor involuntarily in the way all animals including humans shake after a trauma.

(eg. A gazelle that gets away after being chased my a lion will shake violently for a few mins to release it's trauma and then carry on like nothing has happened or when a person who is involved in a car accident will shake afterwards)

I've just started doing it for half an hour daily. It's pretty amazing to be honest.

MachineElf,

Thanks for sharing that. I watched some clips on youtube, but they don't explain much and the practitioners sort of look like they're faking a seizure. However, people have been engaging in similar practices for the longest, from tribal rituals to raves, so I believe there's something behind it.

What confuses me is that the tremors should be involuntary... how do you do that? Sometimes when I use the foam roller on a knot, the muscle will go into a quick spasm just before it starts releasing. But other than that, I don't know how to induce such involuntary contractions.

i hopped on the foam rolling train and i can def. see it benefiting me in the near future. i spent an hour and a half on my whole body to see where i would need the most work and apperently my whole right side from my glute to my ankle is very tight and my left thigh has some spots to work on. i wldnt have guessed my legs to be my tight areas but i supose now i know what to work on, ill post back next week and see if ive noticed any improvements. thanks for the idea tango!

Have you tried somatic movement?

The theory behind it is that muscles are tense due to a weakened mind-body connection. So instead of stretching or massaging the muscles, somatic exercises focus on intentionally furthering the contraction so that the connection can be re-established and the muscle(s) relaxed.

When I first started doing it my back and neck muscles especially released in a very jerky, almost cramped, fashion; but after a while I felt much, much better.

Could be worth trying before doing something more invasive.

However, thanks for the foam roller tip. I will definitely be acquiring one.

Drey420: I'm glad to hear you've had a good experience with the roller. The IT band, extending from the glutes to the knee on the outside of the leg tends to get very tight. As for trying to find out which body parts could use some stretching, something I've discovered is that once the tightest muscles start to release, that gives you access to other regions of the body upon which you previously had no access whatsoever. As you continue to untangle the fibers, you keep finding new muscles that prevent you from performing a certain motion (I use yoga poses as a barometer). Btw, a very good place to start is the hip area: in yoga, they say that once you've released the hips, everything else will follow.

Kensho: I haven't tried somatic movement, but will look it up. I know progressive relaxation techniques require you to contract the muscles before relaxing them, probably with the same objective of building awareness.

However, specific isometric muscular contractions are not easy to accomplish exactly because, as you said, the mind-body connection might not be very strong. A lot of the athletic training targets making this connection more efficient rather than doing anything to a muscle itself.

As for stretching, as my body awareness kept improving, my technique changed quite a bit. At this point, a lot of the stretches i do involve very little movement that's visible from the outside and focus, instead, on small twists and pulls focused on the deeper muscles.

If a muscle has 2 points of attachment, in a regular stretch the muscle is pulled at the extremities. The problem here is that for a very tight muscle the force needed to untangle it using this method would damage the fibers or the joints. I address this by finding a problem area (full of knots), letting it sink into the foam, then GENTLY pulling the other end of the muscle. That's basically creating a fake point of attachment which allows you to target the stretching on a very specific area, as opposed to continuously pulling the entire surface of the muscle (which may elongate parts of it to the point where they become fragile while leaving other parts full of knots).

yea my right IT band and hip are aweful so im gonna work on those but i am gonna do my whole body cuz it leaves you feeling so good. i think it caused me to take a nap today honestly.