I can't even begin to tell you the number of people who I've worked with
who tell me they have tight hamstrings, who don't have tight hamstrings at all.
Let me explain the tightness that you might be feeling through your hamstrings
that can actually come from that can come from a number of different things.
Firstly, it might not be your hamstrings whatsoever.
There are a number of cases
and situations that will go through where it is your hamstrings,
but it's not actually tightness that we're talking about, but we'll get there.
Let's start with a situation where it's not the hammies whatsoever.
So the hamstrings, they, quick anatomy lesson, the hamstrings
start at a common origin of on the pelvis or the back of the pelvis.
On your sit bones, they run down the back of your thigh,
three of them, and those that medially and laterally around the back of the knee.
So to the inside of the outside, around the back of the knee,
on the top of the lower leg bones.
Now, that is a very similar path that they take as another
very important structure, which is the sciatic nerve.
Those of you who've dealt with back pain and neuro kind of like pain,
you'll be very familiar with the sciatic nerve and sciatica as a term.
The sciatic nerve can start to give you posterior thigh pain.
Pain of the back of the thigh, which can masquerade as hamstring issues.
So the way to differentiate whether you're getting issues from tightness
in your hamstrings or versus sciatic pain is very, very straightforward.
So we have to sit down here.
We can start out top down.
We're going to bring our chin dance was just roll your shoulders forwards.
I'm going to be my chin right down to my chest.
Yet because of my friends here, I will do in a second.
Roll your shoulders forwards, hunched into this awful posture.
And from there, what I want you to do is to lift to the side.
I want to pull your toes up towards your chin and then straighten the knee.
Okay, now let me just do it.
My head down. No muscle of mine. But you'll be able to.
You'll be able to see your chest to
strengthen the knee.
Now, in that position,
you may feel a little bit of tightness in the back of the knee.
There are few as a differentiating, whether that's or back to the thigh.
There are a few ways differentiating whether that truly is
hamstring
related or with that sciatic nerve related you show you.
So in this position, chin down, hunched forward,
dorsiflexion.
If that pain is there and you lift up,
straighten up your back, straighten up your head, and that pain's gone.
We've taken the tension off.
Isn't enough to nothing in terms of the the position of the hamstrings
case of his hamstring related you'll still feel tightness but this eases
your pain discomfort is because we've taken the tension off the
from the brainstem down the spinal cord down to where the sciatic nerve comes out.
The nerve roots of the lumbar spine take that tension off the system.
Now we can look at it a different way around.
So from here, we come up into our position.
We can keep our head down if we plant offloads,
taking the tension off the sciatic nerve from the other end.
And again, the tension goes away.
If it's hamstring related, the tension
will stay the whole time while your hip flex knee extended.
If it's to do with anxiety nerves instead.
And those two little tweaks will affect the tension on that sciatic nerve.
And it's actually also the exercise that'll help make this whole thing better.
So you can get into a position where you're here,
you're up and down, and we can just do some sciatic nerve
flossing movements and that in itself.
Do that 20 times through, twice a day,
every day for a period of weeks that will start to get the songs
in the moving better on the path that is meant to be traveling.
So that in itself is our first point
that it might not actually be your hamstrings
sciatic nerve moving better, everything starts to move a little bit more freely.
From there we can look at situations where
it might be your hamstrings that are causing you the problem.
But it's not necessarily that they're tight.
It's not necessarily that they are kind of
pulled really tense constantly
in the short in position, the muscle belly kind of bundled up in the back of
your thigh.
They're pretty constant tension on the muscle.
Might not be that. It might be the opposite.
It might be.
But again, if we talk think about the origin and insertion
of those hamstring muscles
and we think about not
that we're putting tension through the muscle and pulling it tight,
but instead we're moving the origin and insertion away from one another.
So by tilting the pelvis forwards, we're lifting the bones up.
Obviously the insertion down here isn't going anywhere,
so we're creating more distance between the two ends of those hamstring muscles.
Now, I'm obviously actively anteriorly tilting the post arching my lower back
but some people who are particularly either tight
which kind of and or tight situation tight through their hip flexors and quads
but also time for their lower back
or weak through that core
and wait through the hamstrings get into position.
And again you see Google likes Google Low across syndrome.
They get into position where naturally the muscle imbalances around here,
the fact that we're tight and weak, weak and tight,
naturally put those hamstrings and lengthen positions.
So they're just constantly under tension.
It's not that they're overly stimulated, it's not always on.
It's just that they're constantly in this position where they're under a stretch.
So they feel tight when you try
and then stretch them, but you've got nothing left to give.
It's like taking an elastic band to the point where it's at full stretch
and then trying to stretch it a little bit more
up to the point where you snap it.
That's not we're talking about, but it's
not going to be conducive
to healthy, happy hamstring muscles.
But what do we do?
We don't stretch those hamstrings more and try
just well, if that's the position you live in, let's give you some more room.
It's not that we're trying to deal with the actual imbalance.
So there are various exercises we can work for, stuff you'll be familiar
with already, things like our classic quad stretch here.
Again, we're not doing a warm up.
We can do static stretching.
It's more developmental stretching.
We looking to hear
you want to be warm go into those don't stretch like this from cold
but regular 35
or 30 to 45 second holds squeezing your body pushing your hips forwards
feeling stretched on the front of the thigh
that's going to be getting begin
to get in some of those quadriceps muscles particularly rectus from the big muscle
down the front of the quads that also crosses the hip.
The hip flexor
that we often forget about that gets real tight and affects not full tilt.
We can also get into the hip flexors.
We do usually think about when talking about hip flexors.
So muscles are in our cells so we can get into a position
where we're front foot, elevated back, heel down on the ground
again, squeeze posterior pelvis.
We feel that stretch up
around the front of the hip,
front of the pelvis and naturally, again,
we're going to hold this on 30, 45 seconds.
These are strategies you can do every day.
The stretches that counts are over, the kind of the negative aspects
of the sedentary lifestyle.
As a lot of us live around our running grocery run
for half an hour, an hour a day, most days of the week.
But what about the other 23 hours of the day
where we end up in these kind of fairly dysfunctional movement
patterns, just spending a lot of time at a desk, etc., etc.?
These kinds of exercises start to actually redress that a little bit.
We can do more.
Things like plank variations will help strengthen up our abdominals.
Again, it's not just about loosening off the areas
at a time, the strength in the areas of the weights.
Which brings us into
the last part of this, which is the fact that we say this
all the time about muscles that are a perceived tight mano be tight.
It might be that you're weak in that area
because weak muscles often end up
as tight muscles ends up as a bit of a a protective mechanism.
So where are people genuinely tying their hamstrings?
Well, you may have just done a massive hamstring session in the gym
or a massive sprint.
Workouts and the hamstrings are genuinely tight and so upregulated.
They're so kind of stuck in a position where they're just on, if you like,
of the brain's constantly sending message to them to to to fire.
That's one thing.
But more often than not, actually, you found a weak link and the muscles
tighten itself up or sort of sense a situation where it's just trying to
well yeah, it is protection
in terms of position where it feels most comfortable
and the best way we can affect that, the best way we can help with that
is to progressively just add strength work to address that area.
So I say this for people who get tired tight and they run, people
who get tight hamstrings and they run tight
lower back when they run, we need to also strengthen this area.
So one of my favorite hamstring strengthening exercises to do,
which puts us in a kind of
a mid-range position for those hamstrings, has you on your back
heels up on
what could be a box or a chair in this instance, a bench.
We're going to have around about 30 degree knee bend here.
We stick your heels into the bench.
Oh, it's a squeeze your butt, engage your core, flatten
your lower back out to the ground and lift.
I simply going to pull the bench in towards
but obviously the bench hopefully isn't going to move
but that pulling motion really engages those hamstrings.
And we can hold here for 10 seconds
where we come down only ten times 10/2 holds.
When you get really good at that, you can come up
and we can start doing ten times 10/2 holds single leg.
So of course there are various different versions of that
you can do various different ways we can progress that.
But even if you did that three, four times a week, ten times
10/2 holds, your hamstrings will get stronger.
Okay.
We don't need to be doing lots of really intense weights.
You can, by all means.
And of course, especially for those who are in more ballistic sports.
Absolutely do.
But for us runners, this sort of thing go a long way
just to rebalance a potential imbalance
that's coming from those hamstrings that's making you feel tight.