Strengthening Foam Roller

Okay, we're gonna just, um, do a little bit of roller work, a little bit of abdominal work, a little bit of stretching, a little bit of rolling of muscles. So what I'm would like for you to do to set your roller lengthwise on the ground, sit at the end of this. This is maybe mean for me to start with, but it's certainly a challenge. Um, I don't even know if I'll do it beautifully, but let's see what happens. Sit Up Tall, reaching your arms forward, find a little bit of energy through the backs of the legs and let's see if we can just roll ourselves down. If this feels scary to you, just let your hands come along the floor so that they could potentially help you if you needed them. That is rolling down all the way. Let's try that again, but let's come up. So the arms reach forward or towards the ground a little harder on the way out, that's for sure. Let's go down again. So it is Dan, feel free to use your legs to hang on to, to use the mat. I don't think the Mac will help you on the way up. However, how funny is it that it's so much easier on the way down and it's like feels almost impossible on the way it would get better, I promise you that. Hmm. Yeah.

Let's go one more time. Why the legs is easier? I think once your backs are winter, body starts to get used to it. It feels a little easier. And then let's come up. Well, one last thing, shall we try it one more time? Your legs might help press your legs towards you. I think your feet are a jet. I did it nicely once.

One more time. Okay, one more time. Okay. Taking the tailbone or rolling down the back. Sure. Trying to find each vertebra kind of shows you are, you're a bit off balance, doesn't it? And then rolling forward. Oh, one more.

All right, let's go down and stay. We're going to go down and stay. Don't think of it as defeat. Think of it as a challenge to continue practicing. All right, so we're going to do a pelvic curl here just to keep in mind that your back isn't going to come real, real high. I'll um, I'm stuttering off the roller. Here we go.

[inaudible] with your hands or they're just going to rest on the ground and you're going to inhale. So just a gentle hugging of the, the arm bones back. And I don't mean squeeze the roller with your shoulder blades. I just mean feel that shoulder blades go heavy towards the ground and we flatten the back into the roller. As we start to pull the pelvis up, we barely get the back side of the ribs off and we inhale and we're just going to start placing those bones back in. What's nice about the roller is you can really feel that challenge of imprinting each verdict bra individually tailbone down. We're going to do just a few excelling to curl up, curling, keeping the tuck in the tailbone, feeling the backsides of the legs working.

Inhale, hold and exhale. We roll back to him. Well, let's just do that two more. We're rolling now and willing to have. There's lots of stuff you can do with the roller. That's the ways to make stuff harder and ways to make stuff easier. I like this. I don't think it's necessarily harder, easier, just different.

And then we're going to come down. Alright, from there I want us to bring your hands behind her head fully in Sherlock, the fingertips, and we're going to inhale. Here's our chest left XL picking up the chest. Now we can feel the sense of the back really flattening into the roller. Plus we get a little bit of its stability challenge and we exhale to come down and help prepare. Exhale to lift up, just doing just a few of everything and he'll pause. Annex all to come down. Exhaling left in hill and XO down.

Let's say just a couple more of those. Feel how the back can really just flatten and release into the roller as a chest comes forward, the ribs expand around the roller and then we come back down. Just once. More things is going to be our last one I'm going to add on at the top. Okay. So we're just going to take the hands away. Reach for the backsides of the thighs, curl level, little bit more, or just intensify or just find it. Just take the hands into the hula position.

One Hand on top of the other to just the upper body across so it can't be bigger. You'll fall off. Exhale, back to center just over to the other side. No movement in the pelvis, hopefully, and XL back to center, reaching towards that outside knee. Exhale, bring it home towards the outside knee. Exhale, bring it home. Let's do one more teat each side in knee and excellent. Maybe looking for a little bit of heights. Inhale and exhale. Let the hands go at the body.

Come down and just allow the hands to rest down. Don't, um, try not to hold too grippy on the floor. Picking up the left leg, using the abdominals to do so, we're going to hang again onto the center of the body and pick up the opposite way. So here's our leg changes and we all know, I hope that it's important to keep the backstage eval or flat. Inhale, one set of toes go down and exhale. We just change and change. So the challenge here I think is to really maintain the stability on the roller. Really maintain the flatness of the spine or the strength of the abdominals holding the spine flat while our legs challenge that further away or a longer level lever with a bent knee would be a little harder. So you could decide if you wanted to challenge yourself that way. Let's go one more time and the last one on the other side as well.

And then come back both legs together. Careful how low you go. Let's take both legs down and both legs up. Inhale both legs down abdominal. Then exhale, dragging the legs back up. And let's do three more. Check in with your shoulders. They should be relaxed. It's easier to just put the forearms down that it is to just hold with the hands to decide if that's a better position for you. Last one.

Okay. They were gonna just reach one foot down at a time. Alright, we'll come back to the ABS in a minute. Reach your arms straight down at your sides. The arms now are going to stretch overhead.

Feel the backside of the ribs on the roller, bend your elbows out to the side. And as you bend, feel this shoulder blade stretch away from the roll or not squeezing. If you just keep bending until the arms get a little closer to the body and then they start to stretch down and then we'll turn them over and reach back up again. Inhale and just add bending the Elba. So they're making like a goalpost shape in space. Yeah. And then we reach and we'll go again. Inhale, arms up. Exhale, start to bend the arms. Once you get into that goalpost shake, it's going to give you a better stretch. If you think elbow slightly above hands. Good. And then keep finishing there.

And how about two? One, arms up overhead, feeling shoulders broad. And as you stretch the front of the shoulders, we all get so tight in the front of our shoulders and chest. This is a really good way to, um, opportunity to stretch that out. Okay. All right, next we're gonna do the hundred. It's done a little differently or this is my version of it. Anyway, pick up one leg, take up the other leg. You're going to keep your elbows down on the ground and you're going to curl your upper body up into the a hundred position.

So already there's the challenge, right? Stretch the legs out if you wish to. And all we're gonna do here is do the a hundred breath. So inhale and exhale, deepen the abdominals. Think about contracting deeper. Inhale and exhale. See how little you need to use your arms. Exhale. The legs can be high up. They can be bent, they can be on the ground, they can be, oh, they're doing crazy.

Walking like Deborah. Excellent. With every XLC. If you can press your ribs down a little in your chest. Forward a little. I think we got about three more breaths. Do more breaths. Last breath and then, and had town and feet down. It doesn't look like a bunch of it. Yeah. Feels like a lot. I think. Um, let's roll off the roller and then lift your hips back up into a bridge and slide the roller underneath your pelvis.

So I've just put mine right about at my sacred joint. My s s I joined right at the bony base of my spine. We're going to pick the legs up. We're just going to rock here from side to side, rocking over onto one side of the head, back onto that hip crest. And then across the opposite side, just letting the roller give you like a self-made massage, crossing the body over to one side, pulling the abdominals back, changing and crossing to the other side and coming back.

You can do the same thing, but let's take the left foot and just reach it across the right knee so it'll, it'll be different and feel different. You'll feel more muscle to push into as you go into the leg that's on top and you'll feel more of a stretch, I believe as you come away from that just feels pretty good. Is that okay in your knee? Yeah. And then change. Let's go one more time on each side. Cross. Oh, is it a good idea to just keep gently working the obliques here?

Might as well support your spine and strengthen your obliques. Two birds with one stone. Let's change. Let me just do two to each side so we go away and back and into the muscle. If you're in a different direction, that's fine too. And back, last one and last one. I'm back. All right. Now I, let's just take the same leg that's up.

Hold onto it with both hands. Pull it towards your body. And I, for me, I like to bring my knees slightly to the side. I'm just gonna take that opposite leg. Reach it out straight. Just start to take it down towards the ground. What I'm looking for is a hip flexor stretch in the leg. That's straight. Yeah, that's kind of it. I, in my opinion, it's a really nice one.

I know. And it's not even about reaching the floor. I'm not touching the floor either. It's just about reaching that. It's like we're trying to pull the thigh bone out of the hip joint. So always the more you hold your abs and the bigger the stretch will be, that's a promise and then let's ease our way out of it by gently bending the knee and then just guiding the knee back and we'll change sides. You guys were all able to feel a stretch there? Yeah, if you get a little, so just the opposite light comes in. We reached the lay out in a way.

If you feel like you're just stuck in the front and the leg that the knee is bending towards the body, just let it go out to the side. It's okay. [inaudible] I just remember that sense of trying to take the lake further away from the body. All right, gently bend the knee to real. Let the stretch go before you drag your leg back and then bring the knees towards the chest and just slowly real slow and roll the roller away. And it can give you again, just a little bit of a massage down the sacral area down the outside of the hips. And as you push it away, your tailbone, it'll just gently release to the ground and then you can hold the backs of your legs where you can. S I don't want to get up yet. That feels good.

All right. When you're ready you can just rock yourself up and we're going to roll our it band and our vast is ladder allies if that's a tight place for you. So you can roll just about anything in your body. You can roll your back on the roller. We're going to start with our legs. We'll probably finish with our backing. Roll your shins, you're gonna roll your thighs. We don't have time to do all of that, but that's how creative you can be.

So what we are going to do is get up on the roller and what I've done is just put the right between the thigh, the side of the hipbone and the greater trow canter and the ILIAC crest. There's a, there's a muscle. Just let them let yourself rest in that pocket of muscle and then just reach forward over it. Just Kinda rock back and forth over it and rock back. Aw. And I'm just, yeah, fine.

When you find a place that feels tight, that's probably where your body needs it. There's no perfect place to be safe if you'd rather, I just found it felt better on my elbow and then back. All right, now we're going to get over the hump of that greater trow cancers. I just roll right over the top of it and now we're going to roll down the side. So I use my foot to push again, there's a not a perfect way you could go in front, you could go behind, you can use your hands. I just rolled down. So, uh, right down the side of that leg, that's where we have our ilium, TBL trapped or I t v n only just to the outside of the knee.

Now if you are more tight in your quads, and most of us are, lots of us are tight in our quads and we generally as a species I suppose tend to be tighter in the outer edges of our quads. So what you can do is your role when you're rolling up and down your it down, it's just bias in that direction. So rather than right on the side of your leg, you're going to turn it into your quad a little bit. Go the other way. So I turned towards that. Yeah. Yup. [inaudible] and that should, um, get it for you. Yeah. And just back and forth again. You can play with it by shifting a little bit back, shifting a little bit forward where it feels tender and sensitive.

That's where it needs it. Oh Man. Assertion points. Yeah. Yeah. At the knee and the hip. Oh, no worries. I know. Okay. All right. I'm going to come down. So it kind of hurts while it's happening, but after a minute or two, it starts to feel released.

I get a lot of opinions out of me, don't. Yeah, I have a lot of them. I'll continue to share them for the rest of my life. Um, yeah. So did you find a spot? You don't have to come? No, please, please take your time. All right. So we're just going to go into that, that, that he'd be pleased. Um, and is it just one side or more on one side than the other? It's right. Yeah, right here. We just rocked back and forth here yet.

She's probably probably has to do with all the hiking and sporting and, and all that stuff. This is great for, it can also, if you don't have access to a roller, um, a rolling pin, like a wooden rolling pin for anyone who like needs an idea, you can actually just roll a wooden rolling pin down the side of your thigh. Let's get over the hump of the Elliott or greater trow Kendra and start with the ITV on. Um, oh, this is a bad side for me. Um, I a tennis ball works, although it's a bit hard to balance on, look like people following along the streets. I know people crawling along the streets. Yeah. Whoa, whoa. Get me off this thing. This is just kind of real slow and take your time in the spots that feel Tinder. I'm back and I'm using my hands a little. I'm also using my foot a little. Let's do it.

You need to, oh man. Oh Man. I'm going to go one more time and then I'm going to get off in the foot. No, we're just going to come back and just make your way gently back down to the ground when you're ready. It's kind of, I don't know, it makes you feel a little woken up freer. I don't, I don't know what the right vocabulary is. I've got one more thing for us to do if you wish and then we'll be done with this for the day. So what you can do and what feels pretty nice, um, when you're looking to roll through your back is to just start. I don't know where it would feel comfortable to you. I, I go about mid back and I just, um, I, I hold my head in my hands just to support my neck and then you can just use your feet to roll yourself back.

Um, for a lot of us it's not gonna feel really good to arch over the roller, but if it does feel free just to kind of, when I go towards my pelvis, I just lift my pelvis up and I keep my head up above. It just feels good to roll down the sides of the back and pull back. You can roll all the way to the tips of the shoulder blades or even beyond towards the neck. Well, let's do that just one more time. Rolling through the back. I'm trying to really use your abs here too, I suppose, and then coming all the way down and then when you're ready, just come all the way down onto the floor.

I'll put the roller just at the base of your neck, so right where your skull and your neck meet and just let your head settle into it for a moment. We're going to just, you can just roll over onto one side of your neck. I didn't go easy here and you'll feel, I think all of us feel probably a little bit differently, but different muscles are affected as we turn our head from side to side. So just move slowly and be gentle with yourself. Well, let's maybe just do that one more time or for the rest of the day if you want to. It's kind of a nice way to relieve neck shit, tension.

Sometimes it helps headaches. All right. That's what I got for Ya. For now. You can just take your hat off the roller and let it gently rest on the ground. And when you're ready to come up, you can, it made me feel really relaxed. Oh, thank you guys for coming and playing with me.