Female: Hi everybody, welcome to diet.com video. I am your host Sarah and many times I am in the gym there is a piece of equipment I have no idea what they are or how to use them so I enlisted diet.com fitness expert Katrina who is also my trainer to come and explain how to use these pieces of equipment that I am sure many of you probably have no idea either. A lot of times I see people using these to strap or whatnot but I am not sure personally how to use them or what they are called.
Female: This exists today, it is called a foam roller. The main purpose of the foam roller is for myofascial release. What is that? It increases flexibility in the muscle tissue and it is physical therapy for the exercises and prevents further injury so if you increase the flexibility as you age, your flexibility decreases so you want to use this every time before and after you workout.
The first one that Sarah and I are going to do are hamstrings. The hamstrings get really tight when you are doing any kind of exercises for them or cardiovascular fitness. So we are going to sit on the floor and put the foam roller underneath the belly of the muscle which is the middle. We are going to roll with ours hands back and forth on the hamstring so you go from the insertion where the knee is and all the way up to the glutes. So you roll along with your hands. This is actually an arm workout too because you are on your hands.
Then you can cross over one leg over the other to have more pressure on the hamstring. This one we are going to do our soleus and gastroc. That is the lower and upper calve muscles. Wherever you want to be is on the mat and put the foam roller underneath the belly of our muscle and roll with our hands again.
The same thing as the hamstrings cross over one leg and you can put more pressure on one muscle. This one is really important. A lot of women work their fat muscles to the quads get really sore when you are running, doing any kind of aerobics, doing classes and even lunges, squats, all those things. So the quads are really important. Rolling the quads you are almost in a plank position. The roller is going to be underneath your thighs and you roll on your forearms back and forth.
Again you go from the knees and all the way up to the hips, you do not roll over the knees, just where the insertion of the quads are and you go back and forth. If you want to put more pressure on one, then just lean a little to the side.
Because the alignment of women’s thighs and hips, we are very prone to knee problems so one important part to roll is your IT band, it runs along the side of your thighs and fall on your knees so we definitely want to improve the flexibility of that especially after running or cardiovascular fitness so we are going go be on our side and we are going to put one foot in front of the other and roll back and forth going from the hip all the way down to the bottom of the quad rolling all along the IT bands.
As all of you know, a massage costs a lot of money. So when you want to get the knots out of your back, the best way to have your own masseuse is buying a foam roller, it is often cheaper than one session with a masseuse. For this one, you want to sit on the mat, put your back on the foam roller and roll back and forth with your feet to put more pressure on part of the back, you can just lean (Inaudible). All along the spine, it gets very tight especially with stress from the day working and working out so this is one of my favorites.
Why is it called a blue soup bowl anyway? It means both sides up.
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