About a month or so ago I was in touch with a gentleman at Ball Dynamics, a Colorado based manufacturer and distributor of the FitBall® product line. They sell a variety of swiss balls and medicine balls and accessories, which should be a staple in any athlete’s home exercise equipment.
In exchange for this review, they sent me their Pressure Points™ product, which are a couple of hard rubber balls that are used to put pressure on various parts of your body when there is nobody around to massage you. There are 20 points on the body that are the most sensitive and conducive to acupressure. These points were chosen by acupuncturist and program creator Marc Coseo. Along with the two balls, the package comes with a poster to help you find the 20 different points and a DVD that leads you through finding each point within about a 30 minute timespan.
The packaging for the product recommends that you use the Pressure Points™ system to warm up muscles before athletic activity and to help relieve muscle soreness or back and neck pain. Prior to receiving this product, I have used similar methods as what are described to self-massage some of my muscles, especially on the bottom of my feet.
I have not spent a lot of time with the product given the proximity of its arrival to my goal marathon this Spring and my unwillingness to try anything new in the week or two before a race. I tried locating a few of the different pressure points and tested the product a little bit based on what was similar to things that I have done before, and I did not have a lot of trouble finding the points they referenced in the DVD or applying the pressure as described. I liked what I did try, although that was fairly limited in nature. I will get a better opinion on it next week as I recover from my race.
My wife gave the Pressure Points™ a better try than I did, going through the entire DVD and trying to locate every point that they suggest you use the acupressure on. She had some trouble finding most of the points referenced, and when she did manage to find them she was too uncomfortable to make full use of the system.
The DVD does a good job of describing how to find the different points, but they do not give you very much time to get yourself situated and to use the system. By the time that my wife found a point and actually got the ball placed correctly, the woman on the DVD was halfway through her time using that point and moved on to locating the next point before my wife was ready. If you decide to follow the DVD step by step, then you are going to want to keep a remote handy so that you can pause it regularly.
If you would like to find the introduction to the product, be sure to choose “Play All” on the DVD menu. We originally went straight to the specific points that we wanted to use, which dove directly into the first point on that list. No matter where you start the DVD, it will progress through the entire thing, so if you want to go straight into the pressure points then you can start on the Pressure Points 1-5 option. When we did try the “Play All” selection, we were able to see the introduction and the description of how the process is supposed to work and what it is supposed to do.
When you are watching the DVD, try to ignore the expression on the woman’s face who is demonstrating everything. She doesn’t look quite as uncomfortable as my wife did at times, but she doesn’t look at all happy to be using the balls.
The woman demonstrating everything was young, but everything else about the DVD seemed to ignore the folks that might want to use this system to recover or prepare for a workout. The DVD seems to concentrate on using the balls to improve problems with rehabilitation or to offset the aging process since all of the testimonials that are sprinkled throughout the DVD are from folks that are at or near retirement. The video was very obviously filmed in the late 1980s and just copied from VHS to DVD rather than being updated to fit in a little better with the times.
I will update this review after I have had a couple of sessions where I could go through the entire system so that I can speak a little more from my own experiences than from my wife’s experiences. I certainly would not try using this product before a workout, but I can see how it might promote rapid recovery by encouraging blood flow into your muscles as a post-workout recovery tool.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of The Ball Dynamics Pressure Points™ system from the manufacturer to review on this site. My thoughts on the product are my own (and my wife’s) and do not reflect those of the manufacturer. I was not paid for this review in any way other than receiving a copy of the product.
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