Fantastic Article On Active Release Techniques Using Foam Rollers : Kinky Solutions : A Student's Perspective by Ben Nadel

Fantastic Article On Active Release Techniques Using Foam Rollers

Posted May 11, 2007 at 3:01 PM

I just came across this most excellent article on T-Nation.com titled, "Feel Better For $10." The article outlines how to use a foam roller to perform your own Active Release Techniques (ART) (when you do it yourself, I guess it's called 'Self-Myofascial Release'). This is a very important article for me because I suffer from knee pain due to tightness and adhesions. I have been working with foam rollers in order to try an get me back and squatting and dead-lifting the sweet weight in the gym some day.

Here is the teaser for their article (by Eric Cressey and Mike Robertson):

Ten bucks doesn't buy much nowadays. You could pick up a day pass at some commercial gym, or pull off the co-pay on a visit to the chiropractor. If you're lucky, you might even be able to swing a mediocre Russian mail order bride.

Or, you could just go the safe route with your $10, take our advice, and receive a lifetime of relief from the annoying tightness so many athletes and weekend warriors feel from incessantly beating on their bodies. Don't worry, this isn't an infomercial. We just want you to pick up a foam roller for self-myofascial release and deep tissue massage.

Check out the full article here.

The following images were taken from the above article, displayed here to give you a quick idea of what the article is talking about:

This is the one I do most often at home (the IT band). It is ZERO fun :) The guy in the picture is putting one foot on the ground. Before I realized that you could do that, I was stacking my legs with full body weight. YIKES! The lower quads also hurt something sweet.

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Reader Comments

Very good article, the roller is a great tool. But, Active Release (ART) can not be done with a roller. In ART you are moving one layer of tissue in one direction while the other in moving in oppositon. This can only be done with the practitioner moving tissue in one direction, while the patient moves in the opposite direction. The roller is also a very general tool, covering numerous structures at the same time. ART is very specific, 50 percent of ART procedures are for nerve entrapement syndromes. There is no way you can do this with a roller. Great article but saying you are doing Active Release Technqiues is misleading to say the least.

All the best
Dr. Brian Abelson (ART instructor)

Posted by Dr. Brian Abelson on Jun 27, 2007 at 5:09 PM

@Doc,

That sounds right. When I had ART done on me, I was flexing my knee (extending the muscle) as the practitioner was forcibly digging his thumbs into me leg, moving in the opposite direction. The term they used (Self-Myofascial Release) is that accurate? I did not mean to mislead, I am just a programmer with knee problems :)

Posted by Ben Nadel on Jul 1, 2007 at 10:06 PM

Self-Myofascial Release is a very accurate term. Forcibly digging of thumbs into your leg is not the ideal technique. ART is suppose to be done with more tension than compression. As I said great article, look forward to seeing more.

Posted by Dr. Brian Abelson on Jul 3, 2007 at 7:06 PM

Thanks for the clarification. I had thought that ART was an umbrella term for breaking up scar tissue in any way. But honestly, I can certainly tell you that getting ART from another person seems to be much more affective than using the foam roller :(

Posted by Ben Nadel on Jul 4, 2007 at 5:54 PM

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Fantastic Article On Active Release Techniques Using Foam Rollers : Kinky Solutions : A Student's Perspective by Ben Nadel