Foam Rolling Before or After Workouts

It’s no secret foam rolling helps to expedite recovery and prevent injury, but when is it best to roll out for maximum benefits? Before or after you run?

Coach Jeff explains in today’s daily podcast!


Audio Transcript

Jeff Gaudette: Hey fellow runners and welcome back to the Runners Connect Run to the Top Extra Kick podcast. I hope you’re having a great Tuesday.

Before I get to today’s question, I want to tell you about a sale that we’re currently having.

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We help you avoid hitting the wall, by giving you the exact formula for you to know your specific fueling needs. It comes out to like a 30-day challenge.

On day one, you learn how to calculate how much glycogen you will need in the marathon. That way, you can avoid taking too much or too little to eat as glycogen during the race.

Then on day two, we help you calculate your hydration needs, so we tell you exactly what your sweat rate’s going to be, and then what you need to replenish, to make sure that you stay hydrated during the race.

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Then in the subsequent days, it’s a 30-day challenge. We walk you through all the other aspects of nutrition, how to practice, when to eat if you’re training, how to calculate your calories to make sure that you’re recovering correctly, or if you’re trying to lose weight, it’s helping you lose weight with that.

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Let’s go ahead and get to today’s question which is from Brad.

Brad wrote in this question. What is your thought on foam rolling before versus after workouts?

Brad, that’s a great question.

To start breaking things down, foam rolling is probably one of the most effective recovery and rehab tools that runners can use to help make sure that they’re recovering from their runs.

If you want to use foam rolling before the workouts, it’s something that can help increase range and motion, and get to things out there.

Let’s talk about the benefits of foam rolling before, and then the benefits of foam rolling after, and then how you can use either, depending on what your situation is, to maximize its effectiveness.

With foam rolling before a run, what we’re looking to do are three things.

First, we’re looking to increase our range of motion. There has been a lot of research on foam rolling and one of the conclusions from that research is that foam rolling can increase your range of motion.

That way, you’re able to open up, in this case when we’re talking about running, foam rolling opens up your stride and makes sure that you’re able to move as you need.

It potentially eliminates any limitations or inhibitions during your run, or reduces them if you have them.

Foam rolling your quad for example, or your hamstring, is going to allow you to open up your stride as it needs to, or as your body is required to do, to ensure that you’re running with a little bit better, more mechanically sound, foam.

The second thing it’s going to do, is to help increase blood flow. One of the issues that I see a lot with runners that just head out the door without doing any type of light warmup or stretching or anything like that, is that their bod’s very stiff, there’s not a lot of blood flow going.

There’s a couple of different ways you can increase blood flow. You could do something like a launch matrix, you could do some active stretching, or you can do some foam rolling.

Those are three ways that you can go about warming up your body for a run. So, foam rolling is a way to help warm up your body, prepare the muscles for the fact that they’re going to go out and run.

Starting a run easy isn’t always recommended, even if you’re just going to start out really easy, because you want to make sure that your muscles are warmed up and activated before you get out there.

So that is one way that it can help.

In terms of how you want to approach foam rolling in this sense, you want to make sure that you go easy.

You don’t want to be digging into any sore spots, and you don’t want to be producing any soreness from foam rolling.

Form rolling can produce soreness and I’ll get to this in a little bit in the next section, but you don’t want to be producing soreness if you’re going to foam roll before a run.

Make sure that it’s easy, and make sure that you’re limiting each section.

If you’re going to foam roll your quad, limit it to about a minute, same thing with any other body part, calf, hamstring, hip, glut, whatever you may be working on.

Limit it to about a minute, and that’s going to increase the blood flow, but make sure that you’re not doing too much where you are causing some tissue damage to the muscle, as that could potentially impact your run.

Those are the reasons that you would foam roll before a workout. After a workout, there’s a couple of things that we can work on.

One, going back to the blood flow thing, it can help certain areas that get very tight. You’ve probably noticed this as you run, like if you go on a long run.

It could be your hamstrings, your lower back, your glutes – there are going to be areas that when you’re in that posture, when you’re trying to run with good solid form, that you’re just going to get tired and tight from holding those positions for a long time.

Foam rolling is a great way to loosen up those areas so that they don’t stay tight, so that they recover a little faster.

The next day when you come back to either do a workout or run easy, whatever it may be, you’re not carrying those inhibitions and, for example, if your lower back gets tight, it’s not staying tight and then causing you to run with a little bit of different foam, or something like that which could potentially lead to an injury.

The second thing is that there’s research that foam rolling manipulates the connective tissue, and so what ends up happening is the foam roller damages or stimulates the pain receptors in that muscle tissue, especially when you foam roll somewhat aggressively.

It can help repair that damage that you’ve done to the connective tissue, and the result of that is it’s going to decrease soreness and it’s going to potentially prevent a drop in performance after a hard workout by stimulating those pain receptors.

Foam rolling is one of those things where, after a hard workout, you can go a little bit harder.

We’re talking about one to two minute foam rolling sessions on a particular area, probably going a little bit harder, a little bit deeper, and leaning into the foam roller a little bit more or putting more weight on the foam roller.

That is going to increase your recovery for your next workout and that way, you can do your run the next day, because things have recovered a little bit quicker.

The third thing that you would want to foam roll for potentially after a workout, is injury prevention.

One of the things that we can do, as foam rollers, is help put pressure and knead areas that maybe need to be rehabbed from an injury.

A lot of injuries are caused by tightness or inhibitions in a specific area, and sometimes it’s in the area itself.

For example, if you’re experiencing calf pain, you need to foam roll the calf so that you can loosen up any areas that could be contributing to that injury.

If you have a calf injury, it could be something in your glute. If your glutes tight perhaps the glut isn’t activating, or potentially producing as much force as it should, and that’s causing your calf to have to work harder.

Working your glut and loosening your glut, getting it to activate better, is going to help your calf.

Those are the reasons that you would foam roll after a workout.

You can do before and after, or after, and there’s potential benefits to both. A lot of it depends on your unique situation, which is better or which is worse, and how much time you have.

With running, we’re always trying to balance, can I do everything?

We could list out all these things, about all the benefits that you could do for anything, and then balance out what you have time for.

If you have time to do both before and after, absolutely go ahead and do it.

If you only have time for one, look at what your situation is, and make the best decision for you about what you might think is going to help your run the most.

I hope that answered your question.

With that said, I know I mentioned this yesterday, but remember that we are having that summit on August 17 and you can sign up for it at runnersconnect.net/summit.

In the summit, we’re going to cover things like foam rolling, and massage specifically.

These are modalities that we can look at and say, are we wasting our time with these, or are they helping?

I think this foam rolling question’s a great example of that because, like I said, we’re crunched for time, and things that we can do, so we want to look at what is going to maximize the effectiveness of what we’re trying to accomplish.

Is it foam rolling? Is it acupuncture? Is it massage? Is it heating and icing after or before a run? Is it stretching before and after a run? Massaging before and after a run?

Looking at each of those modalities and what are the benefits of it.

When is it not going to work? That way you can maximize the time that you have available to you.

Again, check it out at runnersconnect.net/summit. We’re excited to put that on for you guys.

Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. I hope you enjoyed the answer, and I’ll be back tomorrow with our next question.

Have a great run today.

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