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BODY ROLLING This body of work has had a profound influence on me. Primarily because it allows me to heal my own wounds. Rather than having to constantly plan on seeing a chiropractor or massage therapist, I am confident that I can get on the ball and work out my own kinks. The ball listens to my disgruntled body parts, and they in turn relinquish their stranglehold on me. Let's face it, if you are going to function on this planet, you are going to experience aches, pains, and stress. The idea is to learn how to use your body in a way that maximizes effectiveness and minimizes pain and discomfort. When you do injure yourself, do you know how to heal? Was there something you did that contributed to your problem, and can you learn anything from your experience so it doesn't have to happen again? This area of body work deals with the consequences of the way we move our bodies while at work, at rest, and at play. Sports medicine is largely responsible for financially supporting many doctors who only take care of weekend athletes, aka weekend warriors. So often I see someone playing a competitive sport, and their shoulders are up around their ears, their breathing patterns are erratic, and they look like they are in pain! Body Rolling is a physical practice that is done with a specially designed and manufactured ball, usually six to nine inches in diameter. There are two fundamental principles underlying the practice. The first is the discovery that muscles release from the point of origin. The "point of origin" is an anatomical term meaning the beginning of the muscle. If you contract a muscle, the direction that it goes in is toward the point of origin. Let's have an experience! Focus your attention on your left arm. Go ahead and make a muscle in your upper arm: pretend you are lifting a weight. What usually happens is the forearm raise up and comes toward the upper arm. And so we realize that the origin of the biceps is somewhere higher up on the arm. The other fundamental principle is the finding that pressure applied to the bone will release all the muscles that are attached to that bone. And so the majority of the work occurs on the first half of the muscle. Even though the work is called Body Rolling, most of the time we work with specific points along the body of the muscle. If you have ever had deep muscle work done, you know that there is connective tissue wrapping around all of our muscles. One of the things I love about Body Rolling is the immediate visual feedback I get after working a specific muscle group. Since most of our bodies consist of pairs of muscles, after I work a specific muscle, there is one muscle in the "after" phase and one muscle in the "before " phase. As we age, the fluidity and autonomy of our muscles becomes compromised. The connective tissue loses some of its elasticity, and begins to adhere to the muscles underneath. And so we lose the distinctions from one muscle to another, and they begin to lose their ability to work alone. All over our bodies (Yamuna questions: limb falling asleep, why pain is often on last half of the muscle, research verifying the muscle release and bone theories.
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