Bucket of balls

This morning I was struck by the powerful, simple utility of a “bucket of balls” — that is, a handy container full of various balls suitable for self-massage. Large balls, small balls, soft balls and hard balls.

Er, so? This sounds rather unremarkable.

What struck me particularly about this today was the exceptional bang-for-buck that can be extracted from a simple bucket of balls, worth no more than $200 total (and that’s if you have expensive taste in balls — you could easily fill your bucket for less). Of course, I have long advocated self-massage as a cheap, safe and not-miraculous-but-still-rather-decent method for managing common muscle pain.

Self-treatment is not just a theme on SaveYourself.ca, it is the theme! What’s new here is that, over time, I’m coming to understand that a bucket of balls is really the best of all self-treatment tools for muscle pain: an easy collection to work on, cheap and endlessly useful, adaptable and portable.

Two years ago, I wouldn’t have recommend a selection of balls as a big deal in particular. I was enamoured with (and experimenting with) many other massage tools, many of which I still like. But balls “win” — ultimately, you just can’t do better than a nice selection of balls! No one prone to muscle pain should be without their balls.

That said, even though it’s easy to find a variety of balls (try a pet shop), there is a particular sort of ball, made of a special foam rubber, that has particularly captured my heart in the past year. I recommend that you drop by ShiatsuBag.com and buy the combo pack of balls. No kickback for me here: just genuine enthusiasm. They have a marvelous array of textures.