What Is The Best Foam Roller on the Market? How Do I Use It for Postural Correction?
…still doing great on the program…Just want to ask you about what you think about foam rollers. There's a product called Foam Roller Plus and I was thinking about getting it to help me with my thoracic spine mobility because I want to get rid of my forward neck posture. I found some foam roller exercises on StrongLifts that I want to try out.
The Best Foam Roller for Postural Correction
The best foam roller to get is the AXIS foam roller from OPTP.com. I'll give you a link at the end of the article where you can purchase it. The foam roller plus will work, but the sleeve on it tends to wear out quickly, and then you find yourself having to buy another and another. It gets to be a pain, and is not as good a value in my opinion.
Using the Foam Roller for Postural Exercise
The foam roller can work very well as a postural tool if you use it correctly. Without verifying what stronglifts recommends, I will tell you the two ways to use it:
Foam Roller Exercise for Postural Improvement #1: Passive Supine Position
The best way to use the foam roller to improve your posture is also the easiest -- just lie on it lengthways. Make sure that your head and your tailbone are supported by the roller. The roller must be six inches in diameter, and must be three feet in length to do this exercise properly.
Once you are comfortably on the roller, allow the arms to fall to the floor in a natural position, palms up. You should be comfortable enough that you can take a nap. Lie in this position for fifteen minutes per day, twice per day, for best results. As you acclimate yourself to the exercise, you should gradually be able to move your hands higher, eventually anywhere within an approximate ninety degree arc range of motion. That means that long term, you should be just as comfortable with your arms on the floor at your sides as you are with them high enough that your knuckles are in line with the top of your head.
Increasing Strength Through Foam Rolling
Performing this exercise twice daily for fifteen minutes each session has been shown to increase neural drive by up to 2% in thirty days. The spine actually lengthens and decompresses when you lie on the roller, creating more space between the vertebrae, thus giving the nerves more room. This phenomenon in turn improves the speed that the neurological messages can travel from the brain to the body – think of it as increasing the bandwidth of your nervous system.
