Practice | 99% of fascia gun is used incorrectly

Last week, a friend from Shanghai asked me: Why do many therapists, fitness coaches, and even her own fascia guns have little effect? ​​My answer to her is: You need to know the level of the problem that needs to be dealt with and the direction of abnormal stress, and then deal with it in a targeted manner, rather than just using a fascia gun to hit the muscles all over the body.

This reminds me of a time when I went to my friend’s studio and saw him using a fascia gun to treat a patient who had strained his arm while working out. The patient was already grimacing in pain, but he kept thrusting the fascia gun into the muscle and moving it back and forth on the muscle. After the treatment, the patient’s pain still did not subside. My friend smiled and said to the patient, “Strains require a long recovery period. After the treatment, the blood circulation will be smooth, which will promote local repair. Go back and rest more and use your arm less. Come back for another treatment in two days and you will be basically healed.”

In fact, when many people talk about fascia gun conditioning, most of them think of the method of picking it up and pressing it along the tense muscles once or twice to relax the muscles. This is what is meant by “killing a chicken with a butcher’s knife”. If you just want to relax, you don’t need to buy a fascia gun at all. A handheld massager on Taobao that costs only a few dozen yuan is completely sufficient.

Suggest

After the patient left, I talked to my friend about my opinion on the fascia gun, and suggested that he should use it as lightly as possible next time, and it is best to just act on the superficial fascia layer, especially not to use the fascia gun to scratch the muscles back and forth. Later, he tried it according to my method and gave me excited feedback: “The effect is really good! It was quite painful at first, but after this operation, the patient can start playing with dumbbells directly.” In fact, in addition to muscle torsion injuries that most people think, there is a bigger reason for strains, which is fascia torsion. Problems with the fascia lead to the loss of coordination between local and overall movements, so that once movement occurs, it will irritate the pain receptors and cause pain.

Here, I will use pain as an example to talk about how to use the fascia gun. First of all, it is clear that pain is just a signal, not the disease itself. Only by looking at pain correctly can we find the root cause of pain and cure it fundamentally. This is a very complicated thing, but it is actually very simple. Problems at different levels of the human body will cause different types of pain. If you want to solve the pain from the root, you must know at which level the problem lies.

Categories

Generally speaking, the pain that is often encountered can be roughly divided into two categories. One is local pain, which is located in a relatively fixed position. The better way to deal with it is to first perform a long-term deep pressure high-frequency treatment on the tight band area of ​​the painful muscle, and then perform a short-term light touch low-frequency treatment on the fascia that wraps the muscle. The key point of the operation is to slowly press the fascia gun into the tight band area of ​​the target muscle with a constant force when treating the muscle, turn on the high-frequency vibration, and maintain the single point for at least 45 seconds.

So that the muscle at that location can start the self-repair process, metabolize actin, and the trigger point disappears; when treating the fascia, it is completely the opposite. Use the fascia gun to quickly touch the target point, and turn on the low-frequency vibration at the same time. It will leave as soon as it touches. At this time, the sudden change of the single point will cause a stress response of the fascia on the same force line, and pull the point. In this way, the local and overall fascia structures are coordinated to a certain extent, and the same pain will not be caused again.

Localized pain fascia gun operation

Location

frequency

time

depth

Muscle tight zone

High frequency (3200/min)

45s

deep

Superficial fascia

Low frequency (1800/min)

moment

Very shallow

For example, if you have muscle pain after training your biceps, first find the tight band area in the biceps (usually on the longest axis), use the fascia gun to perform a long-term deep pressure high-frequency treatment, and then perform a short-term light touch low-frequency treatment on the fascia after the tight band area becomes soft. The former is loosening, and the latter is releasing, and only together can it be a complete myofascial release. When most fascia gun users deal with pain problems, they often only loosen but not release, causing local pain to linger and recur, and in the end they blame the tool for being useless.

The second is referred pain. The location of this type of pain is relatively unfixed. A better way to deal with it is to first perform multiple short-term deep pressure and low-frequency treatments on the vertebral segments where the pain is located, and perform long-term light touch and high-frequency treatments on the fascia in the relevant nerve dermatome area. The key point of the operation is that when treating the vertebral body. It must be pressed deeply to the position closest to the transverse process.

Then the fascia gun is turned on for a momentary vibration, thereby inducing and releasing the abnormal stress around the vertebral body, eliminating the compression of the soft tissue on the nerve root, and solving the root problem of referred pain; because the root problem has been eliminated, the treatment of the fascia in the dermatome nerve area is mainly relaxation, so long-term light touch and high-frequency vibration are required.

Fascial Gun Procedure for Referred Pain

Location

frequency

time

depth

Vertebral segment

Low frequency (1800/min)

3s

deep

Dermatome fascia

High frequency (3200/min)

30s

shallow

For example, if there is pain (discomfort) in the unfixed area on the outside of the calf. Consider that there is abnormal stress in the L5-S1 segment. First, perform multiple short-term deep pressure and low-frequency treatments on the segment to release the abnormal stress around the vertebral body. When it is soft, perform long-term light touch and high-frequency treatment on the fascia on the outside of the calf to relax the fascia in this area. The judgment of the nerve segment must be accurate. The force of relaxing the fascia must be light, otherwise it will be blamed that the fascia gun is useless.

Using a fascia gun

I believe some friends have discover that when using a fascia gun, no matter what kind of pain. The fascia needs to be treat separately. In fact, the fascia gun, the fascia gun, as the name suggests, is design around the fascia. In the human body, whether it is the abnormal tension cause by muscle problems or the tension cause by bone and joint problems. It will be redistribute through the fascia (especially the superficial fascia) so that the body tends to have an average tension.

Because this ancient structure is born with a strong sense of awareness. The user of the fascia gun must make the fascia tension even again after treating the muscles and bones and joints. Otherwise it is easy to be “reshuffled” by the fascia after holding the fascia gun “tap tap tap” for a long time. The key to using a fascia gun to treat the fascia is one word-light! How light is it? The author believes that the best effect is to make the vibration fall on the subcutaneous fascia. Adding one point will make it deeper, and subtracting one point will make it shallow.

The use of tools is based on the understanding of the human body structure. With a good understanding, a pair of chopsticks can solve many problems. The hand follows the heart, and the method comes from the hand. Tools are the extension of the method and the high-level summary of the solution. The key to the wonderful use of tools is to use your heart. So that you can use the tools instead of being use by the tools.