Call me a raving lunatic from another planet, but I’m going to hazard a guess that not everyone out there can afford to have a professional massage every day.  Lucky for us impecunious wretches, there’s the foam roller. 

I wrote about these nifty and shockingly low-tech gizmos on my old blog (side note:  there’s an inverse relationship between the techiness of fitness gadgets and their general effectiveness:  discuss).  Anyway, foam rollers are your garden-variety cylinder of industrial Styrofoam  with  a label reading “Self-Myofascial Release Implement” and a ten-dollar-a-foot price tag.  Ridiculous, yes, but if you shell out the cash for a decent one, it will serve you well and never, ever fall apart.  One good spot to pick one up (and I make exactly zero dollars from this--I just like the people there) is at PerformBetter.com.  Their foam-roller link is here.

Anyway, I had a few readers ask about a foam-rolling routine after I posted the piece on Eric Cressey’s book MAXIMUM STRENGTH, which finally convinced me that foam-rolling isn’t a criminally absurd-looking waste of time (using this implement requires contortions that look suspiciously as if you are having intimate relations with a piece of building material.  You are forewarned). 

For those brave souls who are not deterred from smart and effective training practices just because they make you look like a jackass (I'm certainly not, but then looking like a jackass is no big thing for me), I thought I’d follow up with this quick and effective foam-rolling routine for which, again, I have Cressey to thank. 

(Note to self:  next post mentioning Eric Cressey must focus on what a bonehead he is.)

Enjoy.