But that doesn’t mean it isn’t doing anything.

If you’ve made to a gym or dance studio, oh, anytime in the past decade you’ve probably noticed a not insignificant number of people sitting on white plastic cylinders. Perhaps you’ve done it yourself. This practice is, of course, foam rollingand involves placing your body’s weight onto specially designed, usually plastic implements and slowly rolling over ‘knots’ and ‘tight’ areas in musculature. It has become pervasive in gyms and rehabilitation clinics recently, but has been a common practice for dancers for much longer. The fancy technical name for the foam rolling is self-myofascial release (SMR) and it’s basically a form of self-applied tissue massage. Implements are not limited to the common rollers but to all manner of hard tools, some specially intended for the purpose and others like basketballs and golf balls, decidedly not.
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