Lately, I’ve been noticing how jacked up my body actually is and how much I need to start paying attention to my muscle tissue health. In my opinion, everyone should be doing some sort of self myofascial release (SMR). It amazes me the importance of breaking up adhesions in muscle tissue in order to improve mobility, muscle health, and also muscle tone. Today was probably the perfect example of why more and more people need to learn more about. This morning, you could have found me laying on the ground rolling back and forth on the ground grimacing each time I hit sweet spot. Then flopping on my stopping to hit the pectorals which have a lot of need for soft tissue work.
I think this has become my new obsession. As I’m learning more about SMR it’s crazy how much I’ve been learning about all the connections in the kinetic chain. My main focus area on myself has been fixing my internal rotation. Now, I’m all for the iron so when I came across this video from Kelly Starret of Mobility WOD using a barbell for some soft tissue work I was very intrigued:
So I gave this a try and I swear if Kelly was there, I would have been cursing him our or throwing something at him. At the same time it humbled me and really solidified the importance of taking time out of my days to get some soft tissue work in.
The next area that I focused on was my pectoral muscles. My lack there of internal rotation is directly related to tightness in my pectoral muscles. I’m still feeling the effects of my Monday workout which consisted of this:
So you can only imagine what I was feeling this morning when I decided to do soft tissue work on my pec muscles, which can be done against a wall or on the ground. Here Ben Bruno demonstrates the exercises against the wall:
If you take anything from the post. Please take it upon yourself to look more into SMR because you will benefit greatly from it. It will be a pain in the ass in the beginning especially when you realize how jacked up your body really is. Maybe it won’t be too bad for you and you will think I’m just a little baby when it comes to these exercises and I can’t handle pain. Don’t worry, I won’t be offended. I’ll be happy for you.
Aloha! Aipa out!