by Mitch Hauschildt, MA, ATC, CSCS
I am always looking for new ways to improve tissue quality and performance for my athletes and patients. While I love hands on manual therapy, I often need my athletes to be able to treat themselves to a certain degree. Foam rolling and trigger point therapy with balls is great and we use them a lot, but I really love the concept of pin and stretch.
Pin and stretch is basically finding a tender spot in a muscle, putting pressure on it with something like a foam roll or lacrosse ball and taking it through a range of motion. I have found that the combination of direct pressure (to tolerance) and shear forces (due to the movement of the tissue), makes for a really effective technique for changing neuro tone.
Unfortunately, it has been hard for me to find effective ways to use pin and stretch on the lats until we started playing around with the combination of a TRX Suspension Training and a small stick. By putting the stick or dowel through the foot cradles, it creates an environment where you can be very specific to small areas in the lat while still allowing for a great deal of mobility to take the arm through the full range of motion.
I also love it because we can use the TRX method of progression through the vector principle to vary the amount of pressure that the patient uses on the lat make it effective, but tolerable.
This is something that we are still refining, so I encourage you to utilize it and give me your feedback. Check out the video to see how it works.
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