Foam rolling has come a long way. Pioneered by Israeli scientist and martial artist Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais after sustaining a knee injury during a match, in the early 1920s he combined kinesiology, physiology, and anatomy to create a verbally-guided practice of movements he claimed could repair impaired mobility. He called this the Feldenkrais Method.

Years later, in 1987, physical therapist Sean Gallagher integrated styrofoam rollers into his Feldenkrais Method routine and found it ideal as a muscle massaging tool for injury recovery.

The rest is history.

Although initially created as a rehab tool, the foam roller has made its way into millions of homes as a device for preventative maintenance therapy and post-run decompressing. While studies show foam rolling can relieve muscle soreness and tightness as well as decrease inflammation, some physical therapists and exercise specialists are wary of people doing so incorrectly.

Renowned Boulder, Colorado strength and conditioning specialist Erin Carson coaches some of the most talented athletes in the world, from Olympians competing in triathlon to world tour cyclists. She says foam rolling can absolutely be part of an athlete’s mobility, recovery, and performance routine—but there’s a caveat.

“I use the foam roller as a tool to enhance movement, but I recognize that the hard science behind it is very difficult to find,” Carson says.  “If somebody says the mechanism of using a foam roller to pressure tissue does X, Y Z, I can tell you nothing has ever been proven, there’s no known mechanism to why it works, but we know that, for some people, it does work.”

She compares the lore of foam rolling to icing a sore muscle or injury—some experts claim applying ice to a muscle or joint can delay healing, while others say the opposite.

“For me, ice is really effective in helping me heal a sprained ankle. But not everyone has the same experience,” Carson says. “My perspective with foam rolling is that not everyone needs to foam roll, and not everyone is helped by it, but many people are.”

Amy Parkerson-Mitchell, a physical therapist and running coach based in Overland Park, Kansas, agrees.

“Patients come to me and say, ‘I’m doing this for recovery’ and I ask ‘Is that working for you?’” She says. “As long as it’s not making you feel worse, then it’s fine. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s making a runner feel worse and what’s just offering them temporary relief.”

Parkerson-Mitchell has complicated feelings about foam rolling. While she believes in its benefits, she thinks how runners roll and what they roll with is essential.

“Like these hard lacrosse balls, golf balls, or really dense foam rollers are potentially doing more harm than good,” she says. “I used to have this bag of lacrosse balls at my practice and I’d just give them away to my athletes before I realized that sometimes a material is too dense that it’s pinching things and cutting off blood supply instead of doing what we want it to do, which is mobilize the tissues.”

And finding soft foam rollers can be tough—which is why Parkerson-Mitchell is hesitant to prescribe foam rolling. She says your roller should be soft enough where your finger can press down into it, but not so soft that you’re able to bend it in half. It’s always best to go to a sports store to find a roller so you can test it out firsthand before buying. A racquetball is a good option, as well as a really high-quality pool noodle (not the flimsy ones you can practically tie in a knot).

From our conversations with Carson and Parkerson-Mitchell, we’ve learned that with great foam rolling comes great responsibility—and that while there are benefits to rolling, it’s easy to make mistakes. With their help, we compiled a list of the most common foam rolling mistakes and how to avoid them:

1. Rolling for too long.

Carson recommends a full body foam rolling session should be 10 minutes or less. She’s seen clients who are rolling for 90-plus minutes, and that they come to her complaining of a lot of pain.

“This can piss off the muscles,” she says. “When you relax a muscle, you’re regulating the nervous system so it’s not in a fight or flight state anymore. If you hammer a muscle for too long, you’re up-regulating the stress response.”

Often, when rolling a tight area, less is more. Less pressure and less time.

2. Rolling the wrong area.

A lot of runners roll directly on their IT band, when there’s evidence that doing so can cause more harm than good. Instead, Parkerson-Mitchell says it’s a rule of thumb in physical therapy to treat the joint above and below an injured or sore area.

“The quadratus lumborum is a big back muscle that is attached to the pelvis and is, a lot of the time, involved with IT band tightness,” she says. “So rolling that along with muscles around the IT band versus right on it is a way you can relieve those symptoms. You want to treat the area above and below, because it’s all connected.”

Another example is using a trigger point massage ball on the plantar fascia. While many runners stand on the ball and dig it into their foot, Parkerson-Mitchell says that often the reason the plantar is tight is because it’s sensing a lack of mobility in the calf, so it’s not a bad idea to mobilize that area first.

3. Rolling through pain. 

Neither Parkerson-Mitchell nor Carson are big fans of the phrase, “Hurts so good!” but they understand why runners think that experiencing pain during rolling means that it’s working, even when it’s not.

Parkerson-Mitchell compares it to when you bump your funny bone and then immediately rub it—it distracts the pain momentarily and you don’t feel it as much. If you strained your hamstring and you’re rolling hard on it, it’s temporarily going to “numb” the pain, meaning you’re distracted from the soreness for a moment by another overpowering pain. It doesn’t always help, and can be doing more harm than good.

“I don’t like when my athletes foam roll to a high level of discomfort and pain—I think that’s a bad decision,” Carson says. “But there are so many people that are like, ‘If it doesn’t make me cry, it doesn’t work,’, so I can’t say that’s wrong for that individual person. In my world, pain is never good unless you’re sitting with a physical therapist or a very trusted practitioner.”

4. Not using complimentary rolling tools. 

A foam roller is only one tool that you can use to massage muscles, and runners should explore multiple methods to see which combination works the best for them. Caron advocates for using a Theragun, or similar electronic percussion massage tool, on the quads for more movement and activation because she can control the amount of pressure going into the muscle fiber.

“The goal is to get loose, get relaxed, and to alleviate tension in the muscle or group of muscles,” she says. “That’s the goal of a foam roller, but there are other tools that you can use in conjunction that will compliment it. You might get a better outcome using a combo of the foam roller and Theragun.”

Parkerson-Mitchell says to use percussion instruments with caution, however. She says runners needn’t dig into the muscles, especially with the sharper, pointed gun heads, but that keeping it on the surface can still be beneficial.

“You might think, ‘Oh I can’t feel it, it’s not doing anything,’ if you’re not pressing firmly, but it actually is doing a lot there,” she says.

5. Rolling too fast. 

Sometimes runners see foam rolling as more of a chore than anything, and speed through it as fast as they can. Parkerson-Mitchell says this is a mistake, as you’re not giving the muscle tissue enough time to respond and become compliant and relaxed. When you roll too vigorously, your muscles will go into fight-or-flight mode and tense up, resulting in the opposite release you’re looking for. Roll slowly to the edge of the affected muscle and around it for best results.

Is the Foam Roller Overrated?

Foam rollers are one of the most accessible and cost-efficient recovery tools on the market—you can get one at Dick’s Sporting Goods for $15. Using a foam roller before your run can improve your flexibility and range of motion, and rolling after can reduce delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS). These methods have worked for so many people, it can be hard not to think a foam roller is a fix-all method, but it’s all about how you use it.

“The foam roller is not a bad thing, it’s a good tool if used properly, and that can be said with lots of things,” Parkerson-Mitchell. “It’s where you’re using it and the material you’re using that’s important.

Carson encourages runners to use the foam roller as an explorative journey, figuring out what works for them and how, if ever, they can use it to benefit their running practice. Both she and Parkerson-Mitchell stress that, when you’re dealing with a serious injury that won’t go away with R.I.C.E.—Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation—you should always consult a professional.

“The foam roller is a beautiful tool to help highlight some of the dysfunctions or potentially dicey areas in the body,” Carson says. “It’s a really great tool for some people and works really well to release muscles and open them up. For a lot of other people, it’s too much, and they might be putting too much faith in a tool that maybe has been oversold to us.”