Self-Treatment
We're found that some of our clients like to take the initiative to continue therapy on their own. We love to encourage it and will take the time to teach you how to continue treatment on days between our therapy sessions to help improve your recovery time.
This extra step in the treatment process can help progress the recovery time of your condition substantially. Just as our assisted system of treatment has a series of steps, we recommend a four-step process in self-treatment for best results.
Foam Rolling
Foam rolling is an excellent warm-up for your muscles before performing trigger point therapy and stretching. We champion foam rolling because you can relax relatively easily into it and allow gravity to do most of the work for you. You'll want to pick up two separate foam rollers. One soft and another one that's firm. The reason being, that different intensities are better suited for different areas of our bodies. For instance, our groin muscles and outer-thigh are usually more sensitive and respond better to a softer roller, where muscles like our hamstrings and quadriceps usually respond better to a firm one.
Trigger Point Targeting
Once finished foam-rolling and warming-up your trigger points, its time to get in deep using a standard-issue lacrosse ball. It's important that this is the type of ball you use because it provides just enough pressure to open the muscle, without damaging your tissue, which can be the case if using a non-recommended ball such as a billiard ball or a baseball. The lacrosse ball is ideal because of its provided pressure, stability, and reliability.This technique works well on areas such as the hip muscles, upper gluteals and hip flexors, but can also be applied to just about anywhere on the body as well.
Four Steps of Self-Treatment
1. Foam Rolling
2. Trigger Point Warm-Up
3. Trigger Point Targeting
4. Self-Stretching
Trigger Point Rolling
Warming up your trigger points can be of great relief all on its own, but it will also properly prepare your muscles for the next step of treatment where we will target them more intensely. While you can do this step with many types of balls commonly found around the house, we recommend that you pick up an OPTP Super Pinky ball from Amazon. It has the prefect shape, size and density for providing the exact amount of pressure that we're looking for on this step to warm-up our trigger-points. You can use this ball on most trigger points on your body, performed typically on the floor or sometimes against a wall.
Self-Stretching
Now that you're properly warmed-up and have prepared the areas of your body that will be stretched, let's move on to the stretch itself. Just as we've recommended in the other areas of self-treatment, in this step we highly recommend you pick up a specific type of stretching mat called the SPRI Pro Exercise Mat, which you can also pick up on Amazon. Do not skip out on a good mat. It will not only make the difference between getting a good stretch or not, but it can also make the difference of getting a knee or hip injury or not.