Incorporating foam rollers in your training sessions can help you warm up for exercises, prevent injuries, and ease sore muscles. Apart from myofascial release, foam rollers can be used to build muscles, improves performance, and challenge your body for tougher exercises and can training yoga.
According to research, foam rolling has a significant amount of benefits. Some of them include improving the range of motion, boosting your muscle flexibility, and melting away tension and tightness in your muscles.
Furthermore, a foam roller is one of the cheapest workout tools and can be bought and comfortably used at home. However, since a foam roller is not a stable surface, when exercising with it, you will require more muscles and strength for stability.
Here are some of the workouts you can do using your foam roller:
Hamstring Curl
Hamstring curls on a foam roller can be easier compared to utilizing a stability ball. This is because the foam roller is more stable than the stability ball. Doing this exercise tones your hamstrings and glutes.
Here’s how to do it:
· Lie on your back with your face up, then place a foam roller under your feet.
· Lift your hips as your feet move in towards your body, followed by an outwards movement to exercise your hamstrings.
· Repeat this eight times.
Crawling Pushups
According to fitness experts, this variation is a bit harder compared to ordinary pushups. That’s because your hands will be asymmetrical and positioned on a roller.
Here’s how to do them:
· Ensure you are in a pushup position with your hands at the ends of the foam roller and fingers pointing towards the ground.
· Do a pushup, then step your left foot towards the roller and do another pushup.
· Push the roller away, take a step closer to it with your right foot, and do another pushup.
· Continue until your muscles can’t do anymore.
Coupled with your favorite supplement from musclefax.ws, this variation becomes easy, and you can challenge your body by doing the pushups with both legs stretched out rather than having one knee bent.
Shifting Plank
This exercise aims at bringing dynamic stability, and it is more fun compared to motionless planks. Here is how to do it:
· Ensure that you are in the forearm plank position with your forearms on the foam roller.
· Gently shift your body backward and forward. You can do this by either moving your ankles or rolling the foam roller up and down your forearms.
· Repeat these 8 to 10 times.
You will notice that the forward movement when the roller is closer to your elbows targets your core. The backward movement when the roller is closer to your wrists targets your arms.
Tension Plank
Doing this variation using a foam roller targets the glutes and abductors of the legs, which activates your core and lower abdominals. In addition, doing this workout boosts the performance of fundamental compound movements like deadlifts, pushups, pull-ups, and squats.
This variation is done by gently squeezing and holding a half-length foam roller between your inner thighs as you hold a plank. Ensure that you also squeeze, tuck, and clench your glutes.
