In this video, I'm going to give you the top seven tips to get long term relief from tight
hamstrings. Freeing up tight hamstrings is so difficult because it's more than just stretching
them. The first thought that people think when they have tightness anywhere is to stretch it. And
this is predominant in the healthcare field, even amongst my own colleagues, physical therapists,
they think if something's tight, then stretch it. And there's a lot more depth to look at which I'm
going to cover in this video, your neck. So here's my first tip, glute strengthening, helps increase
hamstring flexibility. And here's why this is important. The glutes, the muscles right here in
the back of your hip, and the hamstrings have the ability to do the same motion called hip extension
where you're moving your leg backwards like this, they can both be involved in that motion.
But if your hamstrings are tight, if you feel that they get tight on you,
then it's very likely that they are over compensating for weak glutes. In other words
between the glutes and the hamstrings, below them, the glutes aren't strong enough to provide enough
hip extension so the hamstrings are overpowering the glutes and doing more work than they should.
And the reality is, hamstrings shouldn't even be the primary muscle involved in that motion, it
should be the glutes, so getting stronger glutes then should allow the hamstrings to quiet down
so that they're not so tight all the time. So now that I said that, you might think okay, I'm
going to go do glute strengthening exercises. But a problem that people run into when strengthening
their glutes is that they can't help but activate their hamstrings to even in simple motions.
For instance, do this right now sit down or stand up wherever you're at, and try to tighten up your
glute muscles, your butt muscles, squeeze your butt muscles, tighten them up, make them stiffen
up. See if you can do that without activating your hamstrings give it a go hold it for 10 seconds
are your hamstrings working? If they are chances are when you
go to the gym or you do some glute dominant exercise, you're probably inadvertently
activating your hamstrings too much. We've got some videos on how to strengthen your glutes
without using your hamstrings so that you can focus on the right muscle. You
can go check that out in the description below. Number two tip is to avoid directly strengthening
your hamstrings. This is a follow up on number one because if you're focusing on a hamstring
strengthening exercises, and not putting enough emphasis on the glutes that are right above it,
then you're going to put yourself in a situation where your hamstrings
want to tend to activate over the glutes when the glutes should be doing most of the work,
the strongest muscle tends to fire right away. Even if it's not the muscle that's supposed to
fire. There's something called sequencing in the body and whenever you're moving
your hips. Generally your hip muscles should be the ones firing not your thigh muscles.
But if you end up firing your thigh muscles when your hip muscles are supposed to be working first,
then you've created an over dominance and you're going to keep your hamstrings tight.
Now there's a chance that you could get your hamstrings so tired during a specific hamstring
workout that they actually loosen up, free up and calm down. And it's really because they're
just so tired that you feel like you can use your glutes better in the moments after that
workout where you worked out your hamstrings. But what inevitably happens afterwards is the
hamstring bench strengthens over the next couple of days and it again becomes a dominant muscle
group. So isolated hamstring exercises really aren't the best thing if you've
got tight hamstrings. Tip number three abdominal strengthening also alleviates
hamstring tightness. Let me show my skeleton. What I mean by this let me give you a quick
explanation abdominals are on the front right here they attach from the ribs to the pelvis bones,
and then hamstrings run right here from the butt bone the sit bone down to the back the sides of
the knee. If your abdominals are weak, then what it tends to do on the front here is allow your
pelvis to tip forward tip in this direction which pulls up the seat bones right here the butt bones
which adds length to your hamstrings. This added length can come off as tightness
in the area. When in reality it's that your hips are too far tilted forward your pelvis to too
far tilted forward. And if you get your pelvis to tilt backwards and arrest in that position, move
from that position, then you should be able to alleviate hamstring tightness for the long term.
Tip number four, avoid quadricep exercises in order to get looser hamstrings. What I
mean by quadricep muscles in case you've never heard of that it's the muscles that are in the
front of the thigh the ones that are right here on this part of my leg. These muscles
work together with the hamstring muscles to counteract the effects of each other.
So if I'm straightening out my knee, the hamstrings here control how fast my
knee straightens out. That might be a difficult concept to get and honestly a lot of healthcare
professionals really don't understand and that they think that the muscles just oppose
each other, meaning one straightens out the knee and the other bends the knee.
But when you're straightening out your knee, the rate, the speed at which it's straightening out,
is heavily controlled by the hamstring muscles. So that means that if you get stronger quad muscles,
and you tend to use your strong quad muscles all the time, like whenever you're walking, running,
exercising, being active in general, then inevitably, your hamstring muscles
tend to get stronger, tighter as well. And that tends to give you the feeling
of tightness in your hamstrings back here on the back of your thigh. Tip number five, avoid
aggressive hamstring stretching, like I just said, at the very beginning of this video,
everybody tends to think that if something feels tight, then go stretch it and that gives you some
relief. Now, light, easy stretching can actually be beneficial to loosen up the hamstrings.
But when I say light stretching, it's kind of ambiguous, people don't really know what I mean.
I mentioned this to patients all the time. And we always have to clarify it. So let me
just clarify it for you right now. If you had to put the intensity of your stretch on a scale of
zero to 10, zero, meaning nothing at all, you feel zero stretch, and 10 meaning a stretch.
So intensity, if you go one notch further, you're going to tear something, generally,
I recommend that you stretch within the zero to three phase zero to three end of that scale.
If you're stretching past the three like to 4, 5, 6 and beyond,
then the stretch starts become too intense, and you actually work against yourself. And here's why
this is gets a little sciency a little medical here, there's some structure some cells inside
your muscles and tendons of your hamstrings. Inside the muscles. They're called muscle
spindles. And inside the tendons are called Golgi tendon organs, you can look this stuff
up. All you need to know about this without getting too sciency is that these cells
are responsible for protecting your muscle and tendon from being overstretched. And what they do
when they detect that they're being overstretched. When this stretch gets really intense and
aggressive, they send a reflex to the body to make that muscle begin to contract
and work against your stretch. Which means that if you stretch more intensely and activate these
Golgi tendon organs and the muscle spindles, then it tends to make the muscle actually get stronger,
rather than lengthen out and truly stretch. So that's why I'm telling you stay on the
lighter end of the stretching scale, so that you can actually be productive with your stretch.
And what you need to know about these stretches is that they only bring short term relief. Just
like I said, the beginning of the video, there's more to it than just stretching.
Stretching can be beneficial on the light end, but it's truly just short term, you've got to go
fix the muscles that I've talked about to get more long-term benefits strengthening the abdominals,
and the glute muscles helps tremendously at calming down those tight hamstrings.
Tip number six is massaging your hamstrings can help increase hamstring flexibility,
temporarily, very much like a light stretch. If you get in there and massage your hamstring
muscles occasionally feel them right where it's tight. If you just dig in with your fingers like
this for about a minute on each side, because you have an outer hamstring on the back of your thigh.
And you have an inner hamstring on the inside part of your thigh on the back,
then you can begin to free up the muscle and it's real simple, you don't have to make it
complicated at all, you can just sit somewhere where your thighs partially off the surface that
you're sitting on and just dig in there and rub it if you want to get a little bit more advanced,
getting a percussion massage gun can make a heck of a difference.
And save your hands from that work as well. Got one here to show you real quick,
what that would look like if you're going to use it. Just switch it on. There we go.
Put it on the third setting here. And you would just push that into your hamstring feels great.
And go about a minute or two really as long as you like, as long as you're not aggravating anything.
There's a slight chance that sciatica could be causing your tight hamstrings,
it does happen. And if you do have a nerve problem using a device like this wouldn't be
the best idea because it can flare up nerves that are irritated vibration is something that is known
to irritate nerve problems. But if it's just stiff muscles, it was just tightness in your hamstrings.
This should be beneficial to work the inside of the muscle, you would just go like that. Do
you want to see the gun that I'm using here go down to the description below.
And you can see a link to Amazon where I got this gun. Now since this is temporary relief,
you wouldn't want to rely on this to make your hamstrings looser for the long run. But this can
assist you in calming down those hamstrings. So that when you start to exercise the right
muscles, the hamstrings aren't taking over so much. Now tip number seven is what I've already
mentioned but I want to hammer this home. It's addressed the root problem. Hamstrings
get tight because they are compensating for other muscle groups. Let me repeat that hamstrings
get tight because they're compensating for other muscle groups.
That means you can't just stretch it away, you have to get the other muscle groups that
are weaker and not doing their job to strengthen up so that those hamstrings
can say, okay, I don't have to compensate for these guys, I don't have to pick up their slack.
I can just relax now, not to be so tight all the time, because I'm holding your body up,
keeping you balanced, keeping you moving and not doing something that's going to make us get hurt.
If you get those weaker muscle groups stronger, your hamstrings will relax and it's usually the
glute muscles, the butt muscles and the abdominal muscles that need some help. And it's very often
that people that have hamstring problems, end up with lower back pain problems, hip problems and
knee problems as well because the hamstrings influence all those joints, all those areas
very directly because of their attachments to the areas and we do have some online programs that can
help you out with addressing the root problem. We have the 20 days back health and wellness
boost program. If you've got more of a back problem with tight hamstrings and you want
to address the root problem, go check that out. And then we've also got a 28-day knee
health and wellness boosts problem this is for people suffering more so from knee problems,
but are also experiencing tight hamstrings. Both of these programs are designed to
get to the root problem with the bias on back problems and a bias on knee problems of course,
so you can go check those out learn more about them down the description
below. I hope this video was helpful for you. If you've got any questions, drop them in the
comments below or just say hello in the comments. Let us know if this helped you out or not.
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