Myofascial Release Ball
(In Progress)
Spring 2025
Self-Myofascial Release (SMFR) massage can help relieve aches and pains, enhance breathing, and improve your posture.
Sport balls like lacrosse and tennis balls are commonly used for self-myofascial release massages because their smaller form factor and firmness help with targeting specific areas while mimicking a deep tissue massage.
After conducting a white space analysis on common sport balls used for SMFR, I decided to focus on creating a lightweight solution that can perform both therapeutic massages and slight deep tissue without sacrificing weight
A mood board was created to capture the feeling and aesthetic that I would like the ball to encompass.
Functional Expression refers to performance wellness products that are stylishly sporty and elevate the activity’s overall experience both functionally and aesthetically.
Initial ideations, rendered with Vizcom
Lattice ideations created in nTop
Iteration I: Honeycomb
Iteration I’s pliability and firmness were in the ball park, but there were new issues faced with durability. While the front and back sides were able to offer generous pliability, they were also the weakest links.
The linear direction of the honeycomb latticing alone was not enough to prevent eventual breakage.
Iteration II: Rubix
For Iteration II, the ball has been slightly enlarged and split into 3, the middle section’s latticing has been rotated.
This iteration managed to address the weak link, but unfortunately a good chunk of pliability was lost.
Iteration III: It’s-It
For Iteration III, the ball is still split into 3 and the middle section’s latticing has been changed to a re-entrant structure, an omnidirectional lattice.
Re-entrant structures have a unique construction that allow them to yield a negative Poisson’s ratio under tension or compression loading.
