So with all of this new found free-time I decided to get something that I've been keeping my eye on for quite some time. In the back section of my local Dick's Sporting Goods store there's a section where they have yoga mats, fitness balls and other items devoted to fitness recovery. Among these are the standard foam rollers ranging from the softest white ones all the way up to the hardest black ones. Ha, and you thought the different colors were for ascetics! Among these plain looking rollers was something that looked like a foam roller. But was more akin to something that was the evil offspring of a foam roller and medieval torture device. It was called a Rumble Roller and retailed for about $70 US for the full length version. Which is the reason that I haven't bought one sooner. The price is a little steep. You could buy two regular black rollers for the price of a single Rumble roller. Anxious to do everything that I can to help heal this back injury, I forked up the extra cash.
Long ago I fell in love with the practice of foam rolling. The premise is simple: depending on your accepted degree of pain tolerance the roller simulates a deep tissue massage. Deep tissue massaging kneads your body's trigger points, increases muscle blood flow and stimulates healing. These concepts aren't new and have been used by professional athletes for quite a long time. I said accepted degree of pain tolerance because to be frank, foam rolling hurts a lot. But it hurts so good! The abuse that I've taken from my roller has helped me stay relatively injury free and brought me back from the brink of a ruined season more than once. In fact, after some excessively boring minutes rolling the section of my hip that has the pinched nerve from my herniated discs I've gotten some very good preliminary results. It may be just what I need right now.
So back to the Rumble Roller. As you can see from the picture it resembles a standard roller but with knobby spikes. They come in two different lengths, 31" and 12" and come in two different colors, black being the firmest, blue being least firmest. There are no other available sizes and the full size model is five inches shorter than a standard roller length. You don't need the extra length. They're more than long enough to get the job done. Unlike standard rollers there's only the two levels of firmness to choose from. Not a lot of options for something so expensive. The company claims that their roller's spikes cause the it to go deeper and reach areas that flat rollers can't.
The roller's made of good quality plastic and exceptionally strong. There was a slight "new car" smell that wasn't unpleasant. Much heavier than a standard roller. It could double as a nice home defense weapon if you can't find your baseball bat last minute!
There was a small instruction booklet that came with it that showed various different rolling positions for several general muscle groups. Foam rolling isn't rocket science and in my opinion very easy to do. Some basic research on YouTube can show you some tips and tricks. But it's basically all variations of the same thing, rolling back and forth. The company recommends that people "experienced" with rolling only use the back model. I'm not sure what qualifies someone as an "expert foam roller". Maybe there's a merit badge out there that I'm unaware of?
My first try of the roller was a little comical. After using my black one for so long I wasn't expecting to find the new one all that painful. Holy shit I was wrong! I screamed like a little girl! I could roll from now until next year on my IT bands on my old roller. I could barely stand 15 seconds on the new one. Those spikes definitely lived up to the company's claim of deeper penetration. Some areas were less painful to roll than others. It did a really good job of beating me up. I was too damn happy to get off the ting to tell if it did what it was supposed to.
After using it for several days my opinion is that it doesn't do a very good job of actually rolling the intended muscle. Yes, it's painful and yes, occasionally it does hit a trigger point that a flat roller probably wouldn't. But it doesn't knead the muscle as it's rolled. That's the whole reason I've opted to return mine. To be fair, the less firm blue model might have functioned more like something that I wanted. But in my opinion you'd be better served buying a cheap tennis ball to lay on to work out hard to reach trigger points. It's a cool looking, but that's about it.
Hope everybody's doing well. I'm still diligently wading through my PT exercises hoping to heal quicker than it's probably actually going to take. I hope you give foam rolling a try. Hope this saves you some time and money. Let me know what you think if you give it a go. Have a great day!
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