Rolling Pins: Not Just for Bread Dough
In my last two articles, I showed you how to warm up your upper body joints using the shoulder tornado. Just recently, I showed you how to have healthier hips using band stomps. In this article, I will show you how to increase the range of motion further in your upper body to get the most out of all your upper body movements like the bench, row, shoulder press, and chin-up.
As the title suggests, it involves an old school rolling pin like the one your mother or grandmother used to roll the dough for those pies and rolls you ate for Thanksgiving (yay for carb loading—let’s do it again on Christmas!). If you don’t have a rolling pin, you can always get the monster stick from the elitefts™ store.
The muscles you'll be targeting are the pectorals, or more specifically the pec/delt tie in, the teres minor, rear delt, levator scapulae, traps, and neck. These muscles are extremely important when it comes to pushing big weight on the bench or military press. If these muscles are tight or have adhesions (scar tissue), this will restrict motion for all the horizontal push/pull and vertical push/pull movements that you do. If you're anything like me and have shoulder and neck issues, this should be at the top of your list of things to do.
I've been using the rolling pin/stick for the past month in this manner and I can say that it has helped me, my clients, and my training partners. I've included a video to show you exactly how to use the rolling pin/stick in this manner. I know I've been on a rehabilitation/prehabilitation kick lately, but what is the point of trying to hit big numbers when you're super tight and setting yourself up for injury? The whole point of training is to get better and avoid injury as much as possible. Please feel free to leave comments and let me know what you think.
How do you use a rolling pin for sore muscles?