Use of a foam roller has become a popular do it yourself way to get rid of muscular pain caused by tightness from exercise. Problem is, most people find themselves going back to the same foam roller over and over, for the same problems. This begs the question: “If muscle pain is caused by tightness, then is the foam roller providing only temporary relief or really getting at the root cause of the problem?”

So if tight muscles are not the root cause of the problem then what is? From my experience, this is really a cascade of proximal causes- muscle pain or joint pain caused by exercised induced muscle tightness, muscle tightness caused by muscle imbalances and muscle imbalances caused by inefficient and mis aligned movement patterns..-This is the chain that comes to mind. So while ultimately changing ones running form may be the answer (and may take awhile to figure out) a simple  intervention that I use and suggest you try in the meantime is strengthening of the opposing muscle group.

 Not only does this reduce the muscle imbalance between the inner and outer thigh (loosening the outer thigh while strengthening the inner thigh), but it also tends to provide longer term relief from the Ilio-Tibial-band pain while you work out improvements in your running form. Additionally, it increases the size of your self help toolkit while improving your understanding of the muscular balance required for long term pain free running.

In this case, since the tightened tissue is on the outer thigh (Ilio-tibial band), the weakened and relatively loose tissue is in the adductor compartment in the inner thigh. So after you loosen the ITB, you want to strengthen the adductor compartment.  There are many variations of this exercise that can be applied to many different areas of the body. This is one simple example that you can use for common ITB pain caused by running.