The Best Foam Rollers

Foam rolling: These days, it seems like everybody’s doing it. A growing body of research as well as bodywork pros—physical therapists, massage therapists, and personal trainers alike—extol the soft-tissue benefits of self-massage for improvements in muscular flexibility and reduction in stiffness (and even pain). Gyms and physical-therapy centers are strewn with them, but how do you know what rollers are best for at-home use? To find out, we whittled down hundreds of options to a top-selling selection of the most popular roller types, and enlisted a cadre of experts and their muscles for more than 45 hours of kneading and compressing. We discovered that the ubiquitous firm-density foam rollers made of expanded polypropylene (EPP) aren’t much different from one another, at least in terms of the therapeutic benefits they can deliver. But the AmazonBasics High-Density Round Foam Roller stood out from the EPP pack as the best basic roller, proving you don’t have to spend a lot to get relief.