If you only learn one thing from this website let it be this: you can relieve muscle pain by rolling on the floor on a tennis ball. I knew a man once, cured 20 years of low back pain in the course of a weekend. Myself, I roll out the day's accumulated tension from my shoulders every night, especially if I've had a long day giving massages. Honestly, I wish they had taught this in high school, it would have saved me many years of shoulder pain. As it was, I learned it in massage school at age 40.

Here's why and how you do it. Lie on the floor, not the couch and not your bed, carpet is fine, on your back, knees up, feet on the floor. Relax, feel your weight sink into the floor, don't try to hold yourself up. Gravity is going to work for us here. Put the ball under the tense area, let's do the area between your shoulder blades. Just reach back, place the ball under you, so that it's lying on the muscles between your spine and one shoulder blade. Now relax again and let your weight fall to the floor, take a long breath. Massage the area by moving your knee side to side, gently - just swaying in a small arc, back and forth.

This accomplishes one of the main goals of a traditional therapeutic massage, being to "wring out" a tense muscle. Your weight falls down, the ball pushes the muscle against your rib cage like a wash board. The muscles accumulated blood, oxygen, chemicals and tension release as they are squeezed out of the muscles - squeezed between the ball and your rib cage. Then, as you sway your knees, fresh blood rich with new oxygen and nutrients, rushes in.

You've effectively wrung the muscle out and put new life into it. Just do that one spot a few seconds, maybe minutes if it feels good and then move the ball. That's the only way to change the position of the ball, is reach back and move it with your hand. Put it in a new tense or painful place, massage that area. Repeat where needed. You can even use it on your neck, right against the vertebrae of your spine, flat on your saccrum, and on your glutes. Glute muscles require a bigger arc in your swaying knees, just take the knee all the way over to the floor and back up.

At first you may feel discomfort when working an area, depends on how overly tight it is and how long it's been that way. Remember stingy pains can be trigger points. This is a great way to start working them out.

Just do a little bit each night, at the end of the day is a good time, and eventually you will not feel so much discomfort. You may even graduate to a harder rubber ball, and one man I knew used a golf ball!

But just start with a tennis ball. Also, take one on trips, if you are sitting for long periods in the car or on a plane. Take the ball and place it under you, on a tense glute muscle, along a tight hip, even a tight hamstring. Leave it there until you feel like it's time to move it, whether it's 20 seconds or 10 minutes. If you put the ball in a tube sock you can sling it over your shoulder and hold it in place!

You can use 2 balls at the same time. Especially wonderful to run up and down both sides of the spine at the same time. And you can invent ways to use them on your arms (I especially need the triceps to release at the end of my day), and roll over on your stomach and use them on your quads.

Try it, keep with it, make it a habit. You'll love it.

2007 © Lisa Henderson, NC-LMBT #4665. This article not to be copied for commercial use.