Vancouver is an active place. The vast majority of people enjoy spending time outdoors, running, hiking, biking, skiing , snowboarding in addition to the traditional teams sports in recreational sports leagues. As a physiotherapist in Vancouver I see lots of people using self myofascial release, the fancy term for foam rolling, or stick rolling. One question that comes up a lot is how much time should I spend rolling?

A dizzying amount of self myofascial release products on the market

The exact parameters of foam rolling are difficult to determine. This owes a large part to how many different types of foam rollers are available on the market these days. Everything from density to width of the roller and time of application make it difficult to study what will lead to the best results with rolling. A group of researchers from Michigan demonstrated that short bouts of foam rolling, either 2 sets of 10 seconds, or 4 sets of 30 seconds did not improve knee range motion(1). Most likely 30 seconds is too short a time to lead to any meaningful changes. Longer periods of time do demonstrate changes in gained range of motion. A group from New York, had shown that more range of motion gains were made in 5 minutes of foam rolling than in 1 minute of foam rolling time. (2)However the magnitude of difference was not very high between the groups, suggesting that longer times on the roller only lead to marginal changes.

Two studies alone do not close the case of duration, there is substantial evidence suggesting that foam rolling can lead to short term changes in joint range of motion. It also appears that anything over one minute of time on the roller is beneficial, with more time on the roller not having much more effect.

To summarize

Foam rolling leads to the best range of motion changes when performing for 1-2 minutes.

References:

1- Couture G., Karlik D., Glass S., Hatzel B.The Effect of Foam Rolling Duration on Hamstring Range of Motion.The Open Orthopaedics Journal, 2015, 9, 450-455

2-Phillips J., Diggin D.,King D. Sforzo G.Effect of Varying self- myofascial release duration on subsequent athletic performance. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research ahead of print

Know Your Roll Part 2