Please arrive 10-15 minutes early to set up, say hi and roll out.

Hi Friends,
Well, as we move into routine and rhythm of classes and practices, I want to reemphasize my request for your attendance at class:
 
Please arrive 10-15 minutes early to set up, say hi and roll out.
 
Just as I am emphasizing the need that you practice outside of class, I am stressing the importance of you using the foam roller, soft ball or hard ball before class begins.
 
One of you wonderful hearts was courageous enough to ask me why and share that you didn’t know what to do to roll out. It’s true it has been many years since I have laid out the whys and whats behind the need to do it. So, inspired by this wonderful question, I am giving you all two long excerpts from two masters of the human body, Gil Hedley and Tom Myers. I will follow up with links to Jill Miller, aka The Roll Model and her YouTube channel for you to search around for what you can do for your corporeal being which feeds your emotional being. May you enjoy treating yourself with such attentive love.

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 “Here’s the thing about the Fuzz: You can see it now.
The Fuzz yields to my fingertips. Sometimes I come across a stronger or thicker strand that doesn’t yield to my fingertips – that represents older fuzz sometimes, or maybe that represents the nerve. But each night when you go to sleep, the interfaces between your muscles grow ‘fuzz’, potentially – and in the morning when you wake up and stretch the fuzz melts; we melt the fuzz. That stiff feeling you have [in the morning] is the solidifying of your tissues, the sliding surfaces aren’t sliding anymore. There’s Fuzz growing in-between them.
You need to stretch.
Every cat in the world gets up in the morning and stretches its body and melts the fuzz in the same way that the fuzz melted when I passed my finger through it.
When you are moving it’s as if you are passing your finger through the fuzz, just like I did on the cadaver form here.
So you have to stretch and move and use your body; in order to melt that fuzz that is building up between the sliding surfaces of your musculature. The sliding surfaces, those shiny white surfaces, of the rectus femoris sliding against the vastus medialis. So, these sliding surfaces are all over your body and the fuzz is all over your body and as you move you melt the fuzz.
Now, what happens if you get an injury? Ah-ha! My Shoulder! [He grabs his shoulder] My shoulder is stiff now, I’m holding my shoulder. I go to bed, I wake up in the morning, I don’t stretch my shoulder – I’m afraid, it hurts. So, I’m wandering around like this, [demonstrates walking with his arm stuck to his side] – last night’s fuzz doesn’t get melted. I go to bed; I sleep some more. Now I have two nights fuzz built up. Now, two nights fuzz is more fuzz than one nights’ fuzz. What if I have a weeks’ fuzz or a months’ fuzz? Now those fuzz fibers start lining up and intertwining and intertangling and all of a sudden you have thicker fibers forming. You start to have an inhibition of the potential for movement there, It’s no longer simply a matter of going ooh-ahh stretch. Now you need some work. Now you might need to do a more systematic exploration of that place to restore the original movement that you lost; usually this is the case – we have a temporary injury then we restore movement but sometimes we call this ageing. The buildup of fuzz amongst the sliding surfaces of our bodies so that our motions become limited, that limit cycles become introduced into our normal full range of motion and we start to walk around like this [he mimics frozen robotic movement]. We’re all fuzzed over, our bodies are literally solidifying. We’re reducing our range of motion in the individual areas of our body and over our entire body in general.
So, I believe that one of the great benefits of body work – whether it be massage or structural therapies or physical therapy or any kind of hands on therapy – These types of therapies introduce movement manually to tissues that have become fuzzed over through lack of movement, whether the lack of movement is because of an injury and a person is protecting that injury or because of personality expression. There was many years I just walked around like this: I was very still and monk like. So, then I became more dynamic in my personality when I realized what I was doing to myself and the kind of life that I wanted. So, you can grow fuzz by choice or by accident or whatever and yet here, now that you have heard the fuzz speech, you know that you can take responsibility for melting the fuzz and if there is too much fuzz in your body and it’s frozen up, you might want to seek help in order to introduce movement so that the new cycle is a little more movement and a little more movement and a little more movement instead of a little less movement and a little less movement and a little less movement.
Fuzz represents time. The easier it is for me to pass my finger through the fuzz, the less amount of time it’s been there. If I’ve got to whip out my scalpel, to dig my way through one otherwise sliding surface and another, you know that that’s been building up for a long time. So you can actually see time in fuzz.
That’s The Fuzz Speech.”
Gil Hedley, 2009

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As the old Bedouin proverb has it: “Water still: poison!  Water moving: life!”
 
If we turn to the nerves’ reaction, rolling can certainly be ‘sensationful’. This is a negative if it is so painful it causes muscle contraction and cellular retraction, so I am not a fan of painful rolling. I prefer my clients stay in the pleasurable realm, or on the ‘hedonic point’ (poised between pleasure and pain).
 
Use rolling to awaken areas of ‘sensori-motor amnesia’ – to bring sensation into places that you (or the client) are not moving in daily life.
 
We tend to miss our own amnesiac areas, for the very simple reason that cannot feel them so we don’t know where they are. Here we can be of help to our clients to make sure they are rolling the bits that need rolling, not just repetitiously rolling the obvious and available bits
 
A slow motion move is better than a static pressure.
 
Not everyone can afford bodywork, so using a tool can be a cheap and cheerful way of getting some of the same effects. When you do, I offer the following advice:
 
1) Move slowly. Fast rolling is less effective at ‘squeezing the sponge’, and can result in creating useless muscle tension, bruising, and perhaps receptor damage.  The deeper you are going, the more slowly you should move.
 
2) Look for ‘unknown’ places. Doing the same rolling program continually has rapidly diminishing returns.  Keep rolling different places in your body, and look for the places you haven’t touched yet, and get in there. For example:  Lying on your side and rolling the inner side of your upper thigh over the roller.  Rolling the front and back of your armpit. Your back has many. Many layers and can be usefully rolled at deeper levels but will not respond to the same-old-same-old.
 
Rolling that is mindful, slow, and perceptive is way more useful than painful rolling that is done quickly while texting, listening to music, and eyeing the hottie on the other side of the gym.
 
–Tom Myers, April 27, 2015

Jill Miller, The Roll Model, Tune Up Fitness
 
Roll Before You Work out? The Science Says Yes!
 
Vagus Voyage with Jill Miller - A myofascial self-massage for downregulation
 
Abdominal Self-Massage on an Inflatable Coregeous® Sponge Ball 
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