What Makes Olga Run? by Bruce Grierson

Author:Bruce Grierson [Grierson, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-345-81245-2
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2014-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

The “OK” Technique

A green, narrow-barreled wine bottle sits on Olga’s bedside table, “so it’s easy for me to reach over and grab it” in the night. Olga hits the bottle three times a week. She thinks this explains a lot. And it may well—but not the way you’re thinking.

The bottle is empty. It’s simply a massage aide.

To begin, she slides the bottle under her back. She feels the cool glass on her skin next to her shoulder blade. Her own body weight creates the therapeutic pressure; it’s like a strong young masseuse from the old country is leaning on her. She rolls over the bottle, moving it down the muscles on one side of the spine, then repeats the process on the other side.

Olga ditches the bottle and then, following a few deep, tidal breaths, starts in with digital manipulation. She pinches the tips of her fingers and starts moving up into the hand. She works the skin like a baker. She moves up to the arm, the shoulder, the top of the head. She massages her scalp with one hand and puts the idle hand to work with some hamstring stretching. She slings a rolled-up towel around the sole of her foot like a stirrup and grasps the two ends and pulls—a gentle static stretch. “I do every part of my face as well,” she says. That, plus plenty of water, she credits with keeping wrinkles at bay.

The program, which takes ninety minutes, started almost by accident a decade ago. All that water was waking her up in the night to pee. Unable to get back to sleep and feeling the time burning away unproductively, she began experimenting with reflexology on her feet. Over the next few weeks, the program expanded north. She now considers her OK technique a key piece, maybe the key piece, of the puzzle of her youthfulness.

Is it?

Self-massage has experienced a mini-renaissance since distance runners discovered that kneading the soles of their feet seems to relieve painful plantar fasciitis. Ryan Hall, a top U.S. marathon runner, cooked up for himself a “self-therapy” technique that’s actually quite similar to Olga’s. Instead of a wine bottle, he rolls his back and hips over a hard rubber lacrosse ball. Instead of a towel to provide resistance on those leg lifts, Hall uses a rubber band. And like Olga, he spends a lot of time on his feet.

The fascia—that nerve-rich net of connective tissue—isn’t just in our feet. It surrounds every muscle and organ and “participates in every body movement,” as the German neurophysiologist Robert Schleip puts it. It basically shrink-wraps us from scalp to toe. Since the fascia also contains a small number of muscle cells, some massage therapists now think the name of the game is to get those muscle cells in the fascia, which have contracted in their tightly wound clients, to let go. There are foam rollers made for that express purpose: they do pretty much the same job as Olga’s green bottle.

Schleip thinks massage

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