Rickard Gustafsson | Saturday, 28 February 2026
At home and when we are out on adventures we usually have some kind of first aid kit so we can care for small mishaps that can happen. Some bandaids and wound washing gets you a long way here. We don’t have to run to the emergency room for every little nick and have a decent feeling when we need to seek treatment or not. The same thing can be true for some small aches and tweaks that can happen to our muscles but that doesn’t seem to be so common. Doing a bit of self massage can go a long way to make you feel and move better.
The protocol is as I have outlined for the triceps massage. If you feel stiff in a muscle start to massage it in long easy strokes, increase pressure over time. When you find a gnarly spot hang out there for about 30 seconds. It shall be uncomfortable but not tear dropping painful. It is not uncommon to feel the muscle to start to losen up in that area within those 30 seconds. If not rest and comeback an other day. Also give the muscles upstream and downstream to the stiff muscle a round of massage as it might be referred pain you are feeling.
On the picture you can see the tools I have at home. And let’s go through them in order.
The foam roller. The big orange thing, you probably have seen variants of this one before. Mine is a plastic pipe with some foam around. Others are just foam of different densities. I prefer stiffer ones as it gives a bit more precision. A good alternative is just a piece of PVC piping with about 10 cm diameter.
This tool fits best for bigger muscles like the legs, calves, the lats and erectors of the back. Works really well for the calves, and you probably have a lot of painful knots in there that you don’t know about.
The lacrosse ball. This has become kind of a golden standard in massage balls. A hard ball with about 6.5 cm in diameter. There are other options than a lacrosse ball. If you live in Scandinavia a bandy ball is a really good alternative. The important thing is that the ball is quite rigid, a tennis ball is usually too soft.
With this one and some creativity you can take care of anything. It can dig deep, if you need to go even deeper a golf ball can be your tool. Very good for working your scapulas standing up against a wall. Can feel very good doing that, and quite painful when you are knotted up. Lying on the floor it can help you dig into your traps and as a fly caster or desk jockey you can have a lot of gnarly things going on here. But there is a better tool for that. The last tool.
The peanut ball. I’m quite sure this started as two lacrosse balls taped together by Kelly Starrett. Now you can buy them ready made as the one on the picture. This feels like a special tool just for the thoracic spine. Taking care of this part of your body can fix a lot of other problems. If this part isn’t moving well you scapulas won’t move well and then you can get pain in almost every where in your upper body. This one I found, or actually all of the tools, when I was an olympic weightlifter. But the peanut was the one that made the biggest difference for me then. It can be a good tool for the calves and other things also but I mainly use it for the thoracic spine by placing it right below my scapulas. One ball at each side of the spine. Then I can just lay on the peanut there and hang out there for a while. Or hug myself to change where I put the pressure. In these two situations I can also “try to wrap my spine” around the peanut to help mobilise. An other exercise to do here is to stretch the arms out and then stretch your arms over head and the back again, repeat a couple of times. Using any of these variants suggested here, after spending some time in one position I move so the peanut moves a couple of centimeters up the back and repeats. I do this until I reach the top of the traps. And that’s usually where the worst things are found. It is like when you get a massage, the squeeze of the upper traps is usually what feels the best, but inverse.
Cheers, Rickard
The marks on the foam roller are bite marks from my dog. These things are much appreciated by dogs but they won’t survive long when a dog gets hold of them.