Workout - How Body Rolling Works

Excerpted from
The Ultimate Body Rolling Workout: The Revolutionary Way to Tone, Lengthen, and Realign Your Body
By Yamuna Zake, Stephanie Golden

The basic principle of Roily Rolling is creating space. Just as people exclaim, "I need my own space!" every part of your body needs its proper space to I unit ion at its best. Pain or discomfort due to a sprain, muscle spasm, or pressure on a nerve is the result of compression-meaning lack of space-in the painful area. Lack of space first manifests as muscle tightness (you can't turn or bend as much as you could before). If you don't release this tightness, the muscles can become so right that they press on a nerve, causing sciatica or numbness in your fingers or toes. And when muscles are contracted, the internal organs also have less space and receive less blood circulation, so their function slows.

Different bodies lack space for different reasons. Almost everyone has some muscles in their body that they don't use, and those areas have collapsed because the underused muscles have lost their ability to Function properly. A muscle that stops functioning atrophies (that is, it starts to shrink and sag) and shortens, so it's no longer taking up its full space. Everyone's body also has areas where the muscles are overworked from holding the body in a particular posture. In this case the lack of space results from the tightness of these constantly contracted muscles.

Dedicated exercisers lack space for other reasons. Weight lifters working to bulk up their muscles, for example, often focus only on the central part of the muscle, because it's the part they can see. Instead of consciously working the whole muscle, they leave out the tendons (the two ends of the muscle that attach it to bone). As they keep bulking the muscle, it shortens, putting stress on the tendons. That's why most sports injuries are tendon strains. Shorter muscles also make joints tighter because they pull the bones together.

Body Rolling creates space in the body by elongating muscle. Once the muscles have their Kill length, they stop pressing into and irritating nerves, and the joints have space to move more freely. When you place the ball at the muscle's starring point, or origin, and allow your body weight to sink into it, you stimulate the tendon, which becomes more elastic, triggering a release through the entire muscle. As you roll toward the muscle's end point, or insertion, you deepen the release. Working with the ball reveals to you how tightness in certain muscles prevents certain joints from moving easily. As you start to release the muscles, the joint automatically loosens up.

Suppose that, like Kathy, you've noticed that your right leg doesn't move as freely from the hip as the left leg, so you use the ball to release your hamstrings (the hack-of-thigh muscles). Now the leg feels freer, but it's still not walking as freely as the other leg. Next you work on the quadriceps (the front-of-thigh muscles), and the leg becomes freer still. Last, you roll out the adductors (the inner-thigh muscles) and find that the entire hip is moving freely. The message here is that your hip tightness resulted from contractions in three different muscle groups that all connect to the hip joint. Using the same kind of logical process in other parts of your body as you work with the ball, you begin to see how groups of muscles can be related to tightness in any area.

Ironing Out Your Muscles

Each type of tissue in our body-skin, muscle, fat, and bone-has its own purpose and needs to be separate from the other tissues in order to function optimally. But we all have particular habitual postures we fall into every day that cause these different tissues to get stuck to each other by connective tissue that glues them together. Over time, circulation decreases in these stuck areas, the skin sags, and fatty deposits (cellulite) accumulate.

We all have stuck places in our body-no matter how much of an athlete we may be, or how conscious of our body we think we are. And exercise by itself isn't enough to change the quality of this tissue; often the repetitive stress of exercise causes the tissues to stick together even more tightly. What Body Rolling does is unstick and decongest these tissues by literally ironing them out. The shapes of individual muscles begin to emerge out of what looked like a single mass, and wrinkles and sagging skin fill out.

Redefining Fitness

Body Rolling introduces a new concept of fitness: that everybody can he fit. As it stands, people have wildly varying ideas of what fitness is. For a man, it might he looking youthful and having muscle definition or being able to press 250 pounds. For a woman, it's often being sexy-which means, according to the reigning image today, thin, tight, hard, and toned. This notion of fitness usually involves losing inches and body fat so she can wear a size 4 instead of an 8.

When people have an idea of fitness like this stuck in their minds, they're likely to sabotage true fitness. One of my clients thought fitness meant cardiovascular capacity. He insisted on going to the gym and using the treadmill even though this exacerbated the effects of a lower back injury. To a young female client, fitness was being flexible, long, strong, and relaxed, so she turned to yoga. But yoga class only worsened the back pain she had started out with, and on top of that she developed pelvic pain. Believing that in the name of being fit, she had to "work through the pain," she wound up injuring herself. Not surprisingly, instead of helping her relax, the classes only made her more tense.

A popular concept today is core fitness, which involves strengthening the deep muscles of the lower torso. One of my clients decided he needed to develop core strength in order to relieve his lower back pain. So he turned to Pilates, a core fitness method. But as it happened, his hips were uneven; one was rotated forward, the other backward. Doing Pilates leg lifts with these hips-whose imbalance was the source of his pain in the first place-exacerbated his lower back problem: his pelvis was contracted so tightly that when he raised his leg, the whole pelvis followed. He couldn't keep both hips on the ground, where they were supposed to remain during the exercise. The twisting of the hips as the legs moved strained the lower back muscles.