♪ Bob and Brad, the two most famous ♪
♪ physical therapists on the internet. ♪
- Hi folks, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- And we are the most famous
physical therapists on the internet.
- In our opinion, of course, Bob.
- Today we're gonna show you how to massage
your hamstrings with a massage gun.
Now, let me tell you right now,
if you've got a hamstring injury,
a strain, or a tear, or a micro tear
it's going to be very hard to do to massage with your hands.
- It is.
- I mean, these are big muscles and, you know,
you're talking about the three hamstrings
and they're hard to get in there with your hands.
You're going to fatigue.
And this is where like a massage gun
or a handheld massage tool comes in very handy.
- Yeah, it's just from personal experience.
I've tried it with my hands.
Yeah, it kind of works for about a minute or two,
but you really need to work these muscles,
especially once things start improving and--
- Yeah.
You get some blood flow to the area.
So let's follow these three rules
when you do the massage with the massage gun.
Now the fibers of the muscle actually
run lengthwise like this.
- Yep.
- And we want you to try to massage
going across the fibers, a little cross
fiber friction massage there.
- Yes, so back and forth.
- Yeah, back and forth that way.
This is go to help if there's some scar tissue,
it's going to help break that up easier.
And again, a good blood flow to the area.
Ideally, you want to stay
on the area until you make a change.
If it starts to feel a little bit better.
- Right.
- I don't want to say that it will go away maybe first time
but you want to see it get better.
If it is too tender, you're going to start
by going wide--
- Yeah.
- And then narrow in on the spot.
- Like with mine
mine was tender right about in here, which is pretty common.
- On that hamstring, yeah.
- And when it was flared up
right after it happened next few days, if I--
I wouldn't go over that, it hurt.
It's like your body's saying stay away from there.
So I'd work down here and then I'd
work the massage gun up around it.
And you know, with time it would, I could work more
over it and then eventually get right on it.
And then it would feel like it hurt, but it hurts so good.
And it felt better the longer I spent on it,
which is a good sign.
- Now, let's say it's a high hamstring injury
way up by the sit bones here.
In that case, you can't go around it really.
You have to go the entire length, maybe,
and to loosen up the muscle and make it more supple
and then eventually go up to the high part of it.
- I mean, I have gone up on the glute.
Not that it's part of it,
but it sure feels good.
- Well, it doesn't hurt.
It doesn't hurt.
- Right.
- And then you want to use the correct head.
So there's a lot of heads that come with these massage guns
and probably the least aggressive one
is the air-filled one and Brad's got that right here.
- It's soft and squishy, which has its place,
and it really works good,
but probably not so much for the hamstring.
- Yeah. I would think it's too, too--
Not aggressive enough.
- Yeah, exactly.
Plus it's kind of rubbery.
So it doesn't slide on your clothing
or your skin that well which,
for the hamstrings that's a big advantage.
- Yeah. I think you'll find the same is true with this.
- Yup.
- It doesn't slide very well.
- I did use this one and I thought it was...
it works okay--
- It's okay.
- But it doesn't slide, but this one
you could use when it's getting better.
Now these are plastic.
- [Bob] And pretty aggressive.
- Yeah. This was my one I used a lot.
And then once it got better, you can go to--
- [Bob] To the bullets.
- Yeah, one of these.
We call this the field goal for obvious reasons.
- So I would guess that you'd probably
want to start with this one.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Nice flat head.
- I think that's a pretty good option
and they fit in so nice and easy and it's ready to go.
- So, you can do it in a side-lying position.
You could do it with the leg straight or you can do it,
have it a little bent, be slack, more on slack then.
- Do you want me to show you what I did?
- Sure, yeah.
- It worked good, cause I tried side-lying
and it worked, but then what I did was
I just started doing it on my back.
and I put this leg up here so it'd be--
- Oh, there we go.
- Relaxed, and then I would just work that.
Or if you have a chair you can put
it up on a chair, worked pretty good too.
And you know, I would work it here
and I can get both hands on it so that you can
- [Bob] You can really go into
- That when it's time to go deep
- [ Bob] And you can go side by side, side by side.
- We can work it this way and we're working across
and you could feel, you know, the fibers of your hamstring.
I got a tiny--
now, I wouldn't say it's--
I got one that's irritated right now.
It's not really a strain,
but I'm probably at 90% healed with it.
Because earlier this spring I was... oh!
- [Bob] I have no problem if you want
to do some length wise too, but yeah.
- And actually, I did take a continuing ad
and they promoted it, they called--
they had a name for it.
- [Bob] I thought it was striping or what's it?
- Stripping!
- [Bob] Stripping!
That's what I was.
- They called it stripping, but it wasn't with a gun.
It was more with your hands or a tool, but either way.
Yeah. There's no hard and fast definite rules, you know.
Do what makes it feel good.
- Right.
And you know, I'd start off with the low speed
because a lot of these have multi-speed,
they'll go up to five, some of them.
- Yep.
- And always start with the low speed
and then you can work your way up.
Always start probably with a small amount of time.
- Sure.
- Maybe a couple of minutes or five minutes.
See how it tolerated.
Check it out next day.
Then you can do more.
- Yeah. Especially if you haven't used the gun before,
you just got one and you used it.
- Right.
- Get used to it.
- If you want to get the least expensive massager,
that's the handheld massager.
This would be for someone who maybe
is a little bit smaller in size, wouldn't you say?
- Yeah, thinner, if you've got thin legs,
you don't need, these won't go as deep.
- They won't go as deep, but you don't need to be as deep
if you're a smaller person.
I like this head, by the way.
It's got a, kind of, surrounds the muscle.
- Yeah.
- It slides up and down.
- That's exactly, I think it's made
for the legs and the arms
- Yeah, back and forth.
Now we're also going to show you
how to do flossing with this right now.
- Now, I really like this technique.
- Yeah, you came up with this idea.
- Well, actually the flossing part came
from Kelly Starrett.
- Right, right.
- Yeah, we use this.
- So you can either use the knee glide,
which I have a single slide.
And we use this for a lot of people
who have knee replacements and this is the fit glide.
You want to angle it up
so the front part is angled up.
This comes with a stand.
And the reason for that is that going down
the hamstring is really not working very hard.
Just kind of sliding down the hill.
- Right.
And you know, and that's what you want to start out with.
You know, you want to do the massage,
and actually we're going to.
- [Bob] The muscle, we want it
relaxed while you're doing the massage.
And so when you're going up, it's relaxed,
the quad is working.
And when you're going down, you just
let it go down the hill.
And that way the hamstring doesn't have to work very hard.
- [Brad] So I'm working it, you know, and I'm finding
that tender spot, which now on mine, isn't that tender.
And then I'm going to continue to do it
with motion and I'm going to go back up
and I'm going to continue working it with motion.
And as it improves, you know,
the next step was we could drop it flat
and it's going to work a little harder, you know?
- [Bob] Yeah, you can go right over the tender spot.
- [Brad] Ooh, there we go.
- [Bob] While you're doing it.
- [Brad] Yeah, and you'll feel it.
I can definitely feel those specific fibers I'm on.
I'm going to work at it sideways a little bit
this way to get some cross mobilization
and then I'm even going to, you can't see it
but I'm going to work it from the other side.
There we go.
Whoa. There we go.
- [Bob] At the end of the video here,
we are going to show you that the--
I don't know if I mentioned this already--
we're going to show the anatomy of the hamstring,
so you can kind of get an idea
- [Brad] On a nice diagram, so you
get a good visualization of those muscles,
and why you go at this angle this way.
- Yeah. So we'll do that right now, Brad.
- Oh, okay.
Very good.
- All right, we have a diagram here
of the hamstring muscles.
We actually have a couple of diagrams
and there's three muscles that
generally make up the hamstring.
We've got the semitendinosus that's in blue.
We've got the semimembranosus that's in green.
That's more on the inside of the thigh.
And then we have the biceps femoris,
which runs more on the outside of the thigh.
And they also talk about a short head of the biceps.
- [Brad] So this is the right leg.
So it's here.
We're looking at, from here to here.
I don't know if you can just, so you have a good reference.
It would be massaging that right leg.
And then this, are we going to talk about?
- [Bob] Let's talk about it.
- This show tears kind of where we're--
- [Bob] Yeah.
- [Brad] In common places.
- [Bob] Yeah. Cause mid bustle and that's close to the mid,
the thickest part of the belly is quite often
where a tear occurs or sometimes these are
the ones that are hard to heal, the high hamstring ones.
Get into those tendons.
- [Brad] Getting right up into the gluteal cleft,
the butt there.
- [Bob] I think one reason is you're sitting
on it quite often.
And the other thing is this is really tendonitis material
and tendons can take a year to heal.
- Yeah, they're--
- Fully heal, not show pain for a year,
but they're a lot harder to heal.
So I got to use this pen.
Yeah.
- So yeah, show that, you know, the fibers are pretty clear.
- [Bob] Yeah, the fibers run up and down this way.
So if you're going to go across the fibers here
obviously you're going to go this way.
- [Brad] Right.
I hope that clears up
or gives you some good guide visualization
of how we massage with the guns.
So very good.
We hope you have good luck
with those hamstrings and keep on running.
(cheerful plucky guitar music)