If you struggle to touch your toes, and you've been told it's because
your hamstrings are weak, not because they're tight, you're being gaslit.
It might be that your hamstrings are weak, but when it comes to flexibility, you
have to train with stretching exercises.
If you've been told that your tight hamstrings are caused by your brain, your
nervous system, it's a partial truth.
Your nervous system does play a big role, but if you can't touch your
toes, you need to do stretching exercises to unlock your muscles.
The truth is flexibility in your hamstrings, or any other muscle for that
matter, it's not actually that complex.
But because mobility and flexibility are an add-on or a sideshow, not
the main event for most people, most fitness trainers, most
instructors haven't really put in the time to understand how it works.
My name is Lucas by the way, I teach something called the Science of
Stretching and I combine the best research from exercise physiology
with my 20 years as a yoga teacher.
And I've developed a system that's really, really effective, based on science to
unlock any muscle in your body, but today we'll focus on your hamstrings.
Stay tuned to the end, I'll show you a stretch and walk you through these
specific techniques you can use.
Before we do that, click on the link down below.
You can download a PDF that references everything we'll talk
about as well as a photo tutorial.
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Let's start off by talking about the anatomy of your hamstrings
and the anatomy of stretching.
Let's start off with locating your hamstrings.
Take two fingers and poke right at the base of your pelvis.
It's called your sits bones or your ischial tuberosity.
You have three hamstring muscles that attach there.
They come down the back of your leg and halfway down on your femur,
you pick up a fourth muscle belly.
So there's three muscles and four muscle bellies that then cross your knee joint.
So your hamstrings are biarticular.
They cross your pelvis and they also cross your knee joint.
Which basically means they're involved in a whole bunch of movements.
Let's take a look now.
The first one that we think of right away is knee flexion.
Knee flexion - my hamstrings contract and I'm able to flex my knee.
The one people often forget about is hip extension.
Let me show you this.
Imagine you're kicking your leg back behind you.
Imagine you're swimming.
This is hip extension.
My hamstrings are firing.
The next one is tucking your tailbone.
This is called posterior pelvic tilt.
My hamstrings fire to pull those sits bones down.
Posterior pelvic tilt.
The final two are very subtle, but they include lateral rotation of my hip
as well as medial rotation of my hip.
Lateral to the outside and medial to the inside.
On the back of your legs we have biceps femoris, the one muscle that bifurcates
into two and then on the medial side you have semimembranosus and Semitendinosis.
These three muscles make up your hamstrings.
When you fold forward and you get stuck, it's usually a combination of one,
two, or all three of these muscles.
Let me show you what happens when you feel your body fighting you.
Let's start off looking at the nervous system element of flexibility.
So if I were to, pull one of my hamstring muscles out, and we were to zoom in on our
hamstring muscle fibers, and let's imagine we had the muscle fibers like these pens.
We have our extrafusal fibers, and then our intrafusal fibers, and some
of these intrafusal fibers make up something called our muscle spindle.
This is a special type of fiber that is a sensory organ.
If you imagine like an alarm on your door, like a burglar alarm, this sensory
organ is looking for too fast or too far.
And when it senses that Lucas's hamstrings are getting stretched too fast or too
far, it sends a signal, it's called an afferent signal, from the muscle itself to
the spinal cord and a motor signal comes right back to the muscle and it contracts.
You've felt this before.
This is called your myotatic reflex or your stretch reflex.
And this is when your body fights you and it can almost make you feel nauseous.
That's the nervous system element you've heard when it comes to stretching.
And this is a very real thing.
Now, the good news is using breathing and repetition, you can dampen
down this reflex very effectively.
OK, next
let's talk about the actual physical change to the muscle tissue itself.
If you were to zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom in, the smallest contractile
unit inside your muscle fibers, these are called sarcomeres, and
think about them like a light switch.
They're either light switch on or light switch off.
Light switch on, muscle contracts, or light switch off, muscle relaxes.
So, the first phase to flexibility training, that nervous system element,
is simply training your existing sarcomeres to relax completely.
It's like your light switch is half off and you need to go to the
breaker box and turn everything down.
That's phase one.
That's the nervous system element.
It'll happen pretty quickly.
You might even feel some of those gains today.
The second element, this is the one that takes more time.
This is when you actually physiologically change your body.
And it's a process called sarcomerogenesis, where you
create more sarcomeres in a line.
This is similar to muscle hypertrophy through bodybuilding
or weight training, for example.
But generally speaking, those sarcomeres would stack in terms of girth, whereas
with sarcomerogenesis for flexibility, they stack in terms of length.
So these two principles are at play when it comes to creating
more length in your body.
In terms of how to put this theory into action, let's get into a
pose and I'll walk you through the technique of opening up your body.
Let's practice a simple supported forward fold.
This is called ragdoll.
You need a stool or a chair.
A coffee table works as well.
Stand behind it.
Step your feet a little wider than your hips, outer edges of
your feet parallel, soften your knees, that'll support your back.
Hinge forward and put your forearms on top of whatever you're using for support.
Drop your head and relax here.
I'll start a timer for us.
And I'd like to introduce you to the Science of Stretching.
When you look at the published literature in exercise physiology, it's very
clear that if your goal is to increase your range of motion, so a deeper
forward fold in this case, the most effective way to stretch is passively.
What that means is, as much as possible in this pose, imagine
your body is like a wet noodle.
In the Science of Stretching, principle number one is called wet noodle.
Like an overcooked spaghetti noodle, try to relax as much as you can.
In the same way that you might contract your biceps to do a bicep
curl, to build muscle, the best way to build muscle would be to contract
your muscle as strongly as you can.
The best way to lengthen your muscles is the opposite, to relax completely.
Since passive stretching is the most effective way to build range
of motion, does that mean that other types of stretching don't work?
Oh, they work, just not as well.
Does that mean that full range of motion movements don't work?
They also work, just not as quickly.
If your goal is quick gains, most efficient gains for flexibility,
passive stretching wins.
It's a clear winner.
The second technique is a breathing technique called breathe to relax.
I'll show you how it works now.
Inhale through your nose to the count of four.
Open your mouth with a "ha", exhale for eight.
Remember before we talked about your myotatic reflex?
This is your muscle spindle sensory organ inside your hamstring muscles.
That muscle spindle right now is sensing that you might be
going too far or too fast.
And it's sending a signal to your spinal cord, which often makes your
hamstring muscles fight you in the pose.
This breathing practice, inhale four through your nose, exhale eight
through your mouth, helps to dampen down or reduce that stretch reflex.
It's very, very effective.
Principle number three has to do with this timer that I've got going here,
and we're doing a three minute hold.
As a general rule, for mobility changes,
we're aiming for two to five minutes in poses.
Why do we need two to five minutes?
Why not 30 seconds?
Well, if you went to the gym and your trainer told you to do
five sets of 12 bicep curls and you said, why do I do five sets?
Why not just one set?
The answer would be you'll get better results.
With stretching, the optimal time in most poses is two to five minutes.
Without that, you won't have enough time to elicit change in your muscles.
The change that we're talking about is that sarcomerogenesis
we spoke about earlier.
Slowly bend your knees more and roll all the way up to stand.
Many of you experienced flexibility gains right away in those first three minutes.
And that would be your nervous system.
Remember we talked about before, training your existing muscle fibers
that are already there just to relax.
That's phase one, the nervous system element.
It'll happen quickly.
They're newbie games.
Phase two takes more time, usually about a month.
And that process, remember, is called sarcomerogenesis, creating
more sarcomeres in the chain.
Now that was a very simple ragdoll pose, but you can apply those same
three principles of practice to really any pose, any forward fold
for your hamstrings or any other part of your body, for that matter.
I have a program called Science of Stretching and you can learn more
about that if you visit YogaBody.
com.
Remember to click on the link down below to grab a PDF guide to all the
terms and references from today's class.
And hit subscribe if you could to support the channel.
Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll see you in the next video.