A portion of Ben Greenfield's podcast monologue explaining the 'cumulative injury cycle'—how fascial cross-adhesions, decreased circulation, microtears, inflammation, and scar tissue cause chronic tension and injury. He recommends decreasing pressure/tension, reducing inflammation, and increasing circulation. Practical measures described include daily deep-tissue work (foam rolling, massage balls, a vibrating "battle star" ball), and a morning 10–15 minute "metabolic mobility" routine posted on his YouTube channel (BenGreenfieldFitness).
Questions this video answers
About 10 to 15 minutes every morning.
On YouTube at YouTube.com BenGreenfieldFitness.
Chapters
Foreign.
As far as my suggestions for how to get things sorted out, how to, how to get rid of injuries fast, I've got a few techniques that I personally use. I'll give you some of them from a, from a nutrition standpoint and also from a movement standpoint. So the first thing that I'd recommend that you do, you know, step number one is deep tissue work. So there is this idea of the cumulative injury cycle. What that means is when you have friction and pressure and tension that arises primarily from cross adhesions, from cross linking in your fascia, the sheath that surrounds all the muscle fiber in your body, what happens is you get decreased circulation, like hypoxia, and decreased blood flow to an area which actually tends to create even more pressure or tension. And eventually what happens is that muscle becomes weak or tight from that lack of circulation and from that constant pressure or tension, and you get to a certain point where it becomes so weak or tight that it develops little micro tears, okay? These micro tears result in chronic inflammation. So now you've got a combination of inflammation and decreased circulation and constant pressure and tension. And eventually your body begins to lay down scar tissue in that area. And scar tissue is very immobile. And so you develop the scar tissue and that leads to even more tension because scar tissue isn't as mobile. And you get this vicious cycle that gets worse and worse and worse as it goes. So the trick is, logically, you want to decrease pressure and tension, you wanna decrease inflammation, and you want to increase circulation to an area so that you get rid of that cumulative injury cycle. Now, one of the things that I personally do to avoid repetitive strain injuries is every morning when I get up, I do about 10 to 15 minutes of deep tissue work. Now, I recently posted to YouTube. If you go to YouTube.com BenGreenfieldFitness what I call my metabolic mobility routine. It's me and my underwear doing a bunch of jumping jacks and burpees and stuff like that. In between hitting up the foam roller, like with the ridges sticking out of it. Massage ball. I've got this little vibrating massage ball, what's called a battle star, which is like rolling, polyurethane, super duper hard type of roller that really digs into muscle tissue.
