Last week we started talking generally about mobility and then focused on “The Stick” as a tool that can help with soft tissue work. To fully maximize the use out of The Stick, or any other tool used for soft tissue work, it helps to have an understanding of how and why they work.

First, you would need a decent understanding of musculoskeletal anatomy. Knowing how and where muscles attach to bones and how they function in movement lays the foundation for what we work on. For example, knowing where muscles attach would help us figure out why a person has poor overhead position or why they have pain when racking a low bar squat.

Second, knowing the structure and positioning of muscle fibers would help us understand where and how to apply force on the tissues. In most cases the force will be applied along the muscle belly instead of across it, but there are some instances where the latter is used.

Third, given all of these specifics, we can look at the musculoskeletal system as a whole. If a muscle or a collection of muscles are tight, then they are shortened. If they are shortened, then there is more tension at their attachment sites. Attachment sites are almost always joints, and therefore joint pain is prevalent when muscle bellies are tight. Doing mobility exercises helps alleviate tension on these muscles to relieve the multi-angled tension at joints. This, in turn, will decrease pain at the joint or along a chain of attachments (e.g. relieving tension at the hip from all angles will decrease lower back and sacral pain).

This is why The Stick is an effective tool because it allows for a more pin pointed application of greater force. The following video is the second half of the video I made with Mike Hom in showing how The Stick can be used. We focus on serratus anterior, the posterior shoulder, calves/achilles, and hamstrings but allude to other ways The Stick can be used. Notice that the stick is used on segments to alleviate tension in the muscle to lessen tension at joints, as described above.