Candace is the founder of YogaByCandace®, a best-selling author, and the founder of Mantra Box®. An ERYT-500hr teacher, and a Certified Personal Trainer from the National Academy of Sports Medicine, she leads yoga workshops, fitness and yoga retreats and teacher trainings worldwide, and never met a challenge she didn’t love.
She is passionate about living your best life, considers herself a lifelong student of yoga, fitness and life, and is always on the path to be her most vibrant self.
Note: Candace is a trauma-informed yoga instructor with a background in Ashtanga, Vinyasa and has extensive Anatomy and Meditation training.
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My name is Candace Cabrera and I’m with team GNC. GNC’s mission is to live well, and to me, that means feeling really good in your body and moving intentionally. And with that in mind, I’m really excited to give you some information about self myofascial release.
We’ve known for years that it’s so important to stretch and have a proper warm-up and cool-down before and after your workout, but what does that really look like? Let’s talk about self myofascial release today and maybe learn something new. So, what is self myofascial release? Well, if you’re somebody who sits at a computer all day, your back is rounded, your head is forward, or maybe you’re a parent with a baby on your hip and you’re kind of out to the side here, then you’re going to want to relax some of those muscle imbalances. Maybe you’re somebody who’s ready to get into the gym and you just want to try something new, and I’ll give you some tips and tricks for a different style of self myofascial release as well.
All right, everybody, let’s get into this. I’m going to show you what’s in my gym bag and what I use for self myofascial release.
It’s important to understand first what fascia is. Fascia is like this spider webby material and we’ve got it all through our entire body, and it’s what’s responsible for helping you to feel really open and really subtle, and it also can be the thing that makes you feel really stiff, like when you first wake up in the morning, the fascia can be kind of tight, and then when you move around or you give yourself a self massage, which is kind of what self myofascial release is, you can help that fascia to open up so you feel much better in your body.
There are a couple different ways you can self myofascial release. One of the ways is to hold on a trigger point for 30 to 90 seconds to just relax the muscle because sometimes our muscle gets stuck because maybe we slept weird, for example. When you do it that way, you get an improved range of motion, you help the muscle to relax, you help your body to de-stress, and therefore you feel much better. The other way you can do it is just a quick pass over your entire body when you’re not feeling any kind of pain and your muscle isn’t stuck in any one direction and you’re just trying to get ready for a good workout. It’s a great way to jumpstart your muscles so you feel really good when your work out.
All right, so let’s see what’s in my bag. First up, have to have a towel for sweat, for stretching on, for all the things, but also if you’re feeling tight through your chest, since we’re talking about warming up, you can just take it long like this and use it as a warm-up or as a cool-down by just coming up and over your body and then bringing your chest through.
Okay, next, always have a resistance band with me. So many different ways you can use this, but for posture, if you’ve got a rounded back, you have a really hard time staying upright, you can hold it like this, a little lower, about here, and then just open and close with micro bend elbows, that’s a great way to improve your posture.
Next up, have a massage gun with me. This is good for kind of like hard to reach places, or one of these rollers is really great. This is good for one of those hard to reach places like the gastrocnemius and the soleus. So, what you would do is make sure that your foot is planted on the ground and then take the roller and you’ll just go slowly up and down, and if you find a trigger point or a knot, you’ll just hold it there, breathe 30 to 90 seconds, and then keep it moving. You can also get into these muscles here, these are called the peroneals, and they’re often really tight if you’re somebody who stands with your feet turned out to the side. And then of course, you’re always going to do both sides.
And then next we have the foam roller. Foam rollers can be made of different material, they can have a tread on it like this, it could be super smooth, they come in different types of densities, this one’s pretty firm so you’re really going to feel it with this one. But if you’re a beginner to self myofascial release with a foam roller, just get something that is smooth and that is softer, and then it’ll be less intense on your body.
Skeletal muscle tissue has muscle spindles and golgi tendon organs, two neural receptors, and when a muscle feels really tight, something’s going on with those two things. When you press firmly on what feels like a knot or an adhesion in those muscles, it helps the golgi tendon organs to relax, and that’s what’s responsible for that sensation of feeling just much more limber after you perform self myofascial release.
So, now I’m going to show you a couple of ways you can use this for hard to reach places. Okay, I’m going to teach you how to roll out your lats, these can be really tight and this can feel like a… Hurts so good is what you’re looking for. So, you’re going to come to lie on your side and position the foam roller just kind of behind your armpit and down a bit. And you can press into your feet to lift your hips up, and if you find a spot just breathe into it and hold it there for 30 or 90 seconds or anywhere in between, and then when you’re ready, you can release, move really slowly and go over to the other side.
Okay, I’m going to teach you how to self myofascial release your upper traps. These can be overworked from stress, from driving, from working on your computer, from using your phone for a long time, and it’s kind of a hard place to get into, so you’ll need a wall so you can lean into it. So, you’ll place your foam roller up against the wall and then position your body so that as you lean into it, your body’s kind of like at a diagonal line here. Begin to just gently press into it by pushing down into your feet and that’ll apply a bit more pressure. If you feel a tender spot, you can already just hold here for 30 to 90 seconds. If you don’t feel anything quite yet, you can simply go up and down until you find something, and if you do, you’ll feel it right away.
The other way you can feel around for trigger points is to open your chest away from the foam roller, and then go back in, move slow and with intention, and again, if you find a spot, just hold 30 to 90 seconds and then release. And as always, you’re going to do everything on both sides.
All right everybody, so that does it. Start incorporating self myofascial release into your practice maybe once, maybe twice a day, and notice the difference. Thanks so much for watching, be sure to like this video, comment and subscribe to the channel. See you next time.
