A piece of advice to follow is to monitor your pain levels. Muscle knots can hurt when they are compressed because they are very close to nerves that may be over stimulated from tightness, or sensitive due to lack of oxygen and nourishment. You may be hesistant to roll on these areas for fear of doing yourself harm or making your pain worse, but if you go easy and be patient the pain will dissappate over time. If you find a really tender area, keep some pressure on it, relax, and breathe, and the pain should go from 7/10 to a 4/10 over 30-60 seconds. If not, come back to it another time, just don’t overdo it.If you take too much advil, you run the risk of health complications, if you take just enough, then you may achieve the benefit of taking the advil. Similarily, the Rehab Roller can be used in moderation to open up blood vessels supplying a muscle knot, or disrupt the neurological feedback loop that maintains the muscle knots. If you press too hard you may actually be decreasing the blood flow, or you may be increasing the nervous system response to the muscle knot. So we suggest staying underneath 5-6/10 pain, where 0 is no pain and 10 is the worst pain imaginable.The good thing about foam rolling is that you usually can’t go too far with this, because the self-administered pain is self-limiting so that you can’t actually hurt yourself long term; making it safe. It may HURT, but the odds that you caused any HARM is low. Kind of like pinching the back of your arms. It really hurts, but there’s no damage. Your body is an incredible biomechanical machine and it generally has defense mechanisms that wont let you inflict more pain than you can handle.  What you want to do is hunt for the “hurts so good” feeling, where the pain also comes with a relieving pleasure. 3-6/10 is also a good pain scale range that you should follow, not going above a 7 but also not going below a 2. This way you can ensure that you’re comfortable, and not going to be aggravating the situation. Additionally, it helps you adapt your pressure as your tolerance increases. Also, don’t be afraid to come back to the painful areas another day. Over time, things will get easier and easier as they become fitter and healthier, so you may just have to be patient. Follow our instagram for more do’s and don’ts! @RehabRoller