- Somehow, we could talk about how, it's not a coincidence, you became synonymous with foam rolling. - Worst part of my life. - It became synonymous with you. That's okay. I mean, it's not okay, but it's okay with me. They weren't saying about me, but I was about to say it's okay.

You know, anytime somebody goes public facing and starts to try and educate people, you know, there's certain things that are sticky. They have like high salience. Like, yes, I like to get into a cold plunge, but how I, how Andrew Huberman became associated with cold plunging or buying a cold plunge is wild.

I mean, sure, I own one and, you know, this sort of thing. And I think they're great for shifting your state, but it's hardly the cornerstone of my life or my existence, but I love it. I use it, but I think foam rolling, I think looked different enough from what people had not seen before.

And it, you know, these things just, they have a stickiness to them. Who knows why? What is the deal with foam rolling? Is there a utility to foam rolling? - Absolutely. - Is there a wrong way to do it? - No, but there's a way that's not a great use of your time.

- Okay. - Right? So what we're all looking at is, we have a finite amount of time. And what's my goal? To quickly touch my whole body? You know, what are we trying to do? So if I was using soft tissue mobilization and or using a roller or a ball or something, what's my goal here?

Well, I think, and the research is very clear, it can help with pain, it can restore range of motion. Again, very clear. And I want to point out sort of one of my research friends, Brent Brookbush, the Brookbush Institute has incredible summaries of musculoskeletal care. Brent is a genius.

And if you go on his site, there's a little hourglass and you can search like sugar points and you'll see all of the deep dive research, analysis of the meta research. Like you'll be like, okay, this is really excellent. And it is tricky because, you know, what doesn't work for my body or wasn't a good use for time now is useless and it's easy to shout on the internet.

So what's our goal? If I was in pain and I was about to exercise, a quick two or three minute intervention working on, let's call it desensitization of the tissues, let's be mechanism agnostic for a second and say that's a really low level to entry safe, highly effective way for you to suddenly feel better.

So we create a window of opportunity to move. That's really cool. I love that. No physical therapists in the room. No one went blind. You didn't dislocate, right? So that could be a really excellent use of some soft tissue work. The same way a boxer would go or an MMA fighter or the Olympic lifters in China, they have people who are giving non-threatening input to the body to tell the brain it's safe or to rehydrate something or get some, again, is it just stimulus so that the brain says it's safe?

Sure. Are we restoring how the tissues slide and glide? Sure. A lot of times I think if you look at any of the mobility work, I'll just put writ large, really comes down to just doing a couple things. Most of them are just isometrics. So we have a lot of isometrics, which everyone can agree is good stuff.

And we do a lot of tempo work. That's really just moving slowly through range. It just may be that I'm using a different tool to have that isometric stimulus or that tempo moving slowly stimulus. So we like to say, hey, let's use mobilizations, mobilizing the tissues. Why are we doing it?

What are we trying to do? Well, pain is a good reason. And again, multifactorial, highly subjective. Why do I have pain? Well, I got in a fight with my wife and I didn't eat and I twisted my knee back in Vietnam. And who knows, right? But what are the inputs that I have to self-soothe and desensitize?

And it turns out a ball and a roller is a really good one. So I can use those to help myself feel better. Did that solve the problem? Did that solve two weeks of shitty sleep? Did that solve my poor nutrition and lack of fiber? Did that solve the fact that I don't feel safe in this environment?

No, but it got me a window of opportunity where I can go feel better in my body. Is anyone against that? No, okay. So what we can also say is, hey, this would be a great way to do what? Restore your range of motion. A one tool in a system of tools to get you to do what?

Have normative range again, right? For whatever reason, your lats are super stiff. Your doesn't, again, it's more complicated than that, but sometimes it's not more complicated than that. And if I just get you getting some input into there, maybe we can restore that range of motion or create a window where you can go use it again.

Lastly, I would say is that it's a wonderful tool to decrease DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness. So in the evening, you blow out your quads, do a little soft tissue work. And what you'll see is maybe that's blood flow. Maybe it's non-threatening input. Maybe it's just massage. Maybe it's just the parasympathetic input that massage has.

Touch, right, just down regulates. Maybe those are the reasons I feel better. But the bottom line is, is that a good use of your time? Yes. Are all techniques on the road the same? No, right? And I think that's where we've lost our minds is that if you just rolled up and down on your calf, didn't do anything.

It's like, yeah, well, you just, what are you doing, right? What if I rolled side to side? And so suddenly we can start to layer in some really complex thinking around this. How about this? You have a roller out and I put my calf on there and I start rolling side to side.

Should that be uncomfortable? I'm guessing you're going to say no, but anytime I've used a roller, anytime I've used a roller, I'm like, man, that hurts. I don't like it, that sucks. Well, I mean, I don't mind it. Like, it's not like the kind of, it's not like level eight pain or anything.

It's just, it's sort of like, it feels very localized. Even if the roller is a big fat Costello the Bulldog size roller, it feels like someone's kind of kneading down in between my muscle fibers. And then I started to think maybe I just have like low fiber density. And if I were Mark Bell or something, then this would feel comfortable.

But, you know, I always feel like the roller is going down to the bone. - The base of LFD, low fiber density. So, you know, what I think we can do is let's establish some guidelines for people. 'Cause this is one of the ways that we can feel better in our home, without bourbon, without ibuprofen, without THC.

Like we need to give people some tools that don't, like that aren't just-- - Without having to buy a sauna. If you can afford one, great, but not every-- I mean, this whole thing with sauna, love saunas, but-- - Doesn't scare you. - Well, until very recently in my life, I couldn't afford a sauna, until very recently.

You know, even as a tenured professor at Stanford, I'll just say that, right? - You can actually be angry at your parents for not giving you a sauna. - No, you know, when I was a kid, my dad and I used to go to the Y in the evening sometimes, or I was little, and I'd shoot baskets, or he would lift weights, Nautilus machines back then.

- Yeah. - And then-- - Get brutally big on us. - And then we'd sit in the sauna, or there was a hot tub or something. - And you had a different set of trauma, traumatic experience of sitting in the sauna at the Y. - No, actually, I learned how-- I learned how-- - How to make eye contact.

- I learned how men over 40 spoke in 1985. - There you go. - There you go. - There you go. If everyone had a roller and a ball, there's a lot of dysfunction and discomfort we can manage. If you push on a tissue, we expect that tissue to be painless to compression, or not uncomfortable to compression.

Again, pain is a weird word, I don't want to set that up, but you shouldn't be uncomfortable to compression. What's nice is that if I push on something, all I'm doing is just creating an isometric. It's just a vector isometric. Instead of pulling an isometric through the length of the tissue, I'm putting it at a different vector and angle.

So that would just be one. I could start there, and if it was uncomfortable, well, guess what? Now I can get my nervous system involved. So I can teach my brain that it's safe to create a contraction here. So what do I do? Just flex, flex it, hold it for four seconds.

- This is very basic, I realize, but for many people, they're either already foam rolling and doing it incorrectly, or they're not foam rolling, and we want them to do it correctly. So if I understand correctly, it's "okay" to flex the muscle that you have in contact with the foam roller while you're rolling.

- If I find something that's uncomfortable, or stiff, or doesn't feel like my other side, I'm going to stop. I found a place to work. I'm going to build, take a big inhale. So I take a four second inhale. I want to teach myself that I need to be able to breathe in this position.

One of my friends, Greg Cook, is like, "If you can't breathe in a position, "you don't own a position." You know, that sounds very Iyengar, too. But what we're going to do is we're going to say, "It's okay to breathe here, and I'm going to contract here." And then I'm going to slowly relax and soften.

That's tempo that's moving slowly, and I can handle higher loads. And what'll end up happening is if I repeat that cycle two or three times, guess what? My brain desensitizes that. Changes range of motion. My brain suddenly is like, "That's not a problem anymore." So we just move on.

And in two or three cycles of that contraction, breath hold, long exhale that starts to sound familiar, right, how do I calm down, long exhales? I'm not trying to spin up. I'm trying to say, "This is safe." I've done that with my breath. I've done that with contraction. I'm just getting input in, just touch to my body, especially on parts that maybe don't bark at me very often.

People are shocked to learn that sometimes when they have knee pain, how stiff their quads are. And then we can test it, load it, feel it, palpate it. And I'm like, "Those things are just stiff." And when we un-stiffen them, whatever technique you want to use, restore sliding surfaces, get neural input in there.

We create range of motion. Suddenly we change a motion dynamic, improve deficiency. The brain says, "Hey, that's no longer a threat," or we're experiencing that as a new pattern or position, that'd be enough to reduce your pain. But pain isn't the only reason we're mobilizing. We're mobilizing so that we can reduce session costs, so we can work out harder the next day and keep an eye on our minimums of our range of motion.

- Love this. And another just very basic question, 'cause I'll be honest, I haven't foam rolled much in my life. - And it doesn't have to be a big foam roller, everyone. Sometimes those big white, those are pool noodles, right? That's what it was for. I think like made in Killeen, Texas as like a manufacturing by-product.

And someone's like, "We could put these in the pool." And then some physical therapist was like, "Sweet." Like that thing's way too big and too hard and too square and too soft. Like there's a whole bunch of things. Like sometimes you need an elbow. Sometimes you need a forearm.

Sometimes you need a thumb. So you can have much smaller diameter. I'm a much bigger fan of smaller diameter rollers. I just think they fit your body better. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)