Tight hamstrings when running: why stretching may not help

You're listening to the Restoring Human Movement podcast, where movement experts discuss the latest evidence-based practices to help you and your clients move with mastery. Hey everyone, it's your co-host Sebastian with the Restoring Human Movement podcast. Thanks for joining the Movement Movement. This is your first time listening to the show. Welcome. You've missed a lot of episodes and we mainly specialize in working with people with lower quarter conditions. As you probably notice in a lot of our podcasts, we've talked about sports hernias and hip impingement and lower back pain and hamstrings and knees and feet and so on.

And so we see a ton of people with lower quarter conditions, especially in athletic populations like runners and people who are physically active with their body, baseball, soccer, and so on. So I want to cover one of the concepts today that came up a few times over a number of the patients that we've worked with. By the way, we do coach people virtually on some of these things too. And it's usually easy to implement strategies like I'm going to talk about today if you know what you're looking for and you can plug a hole in the person's life, if you will. So a really common complaint with people who run or sprint is hamstring strains.

Now, I can cover this on a few fronts. Number one is hamstring strains may feel tight but not be tight. I'll talk about that in a second. But also just knowing that part of your strength and conditioning program or lack thereof may be a contributing factor or a risk factor to re-aggravation. Okay, so the first thing is with hamstring strains, there is the feeling of tightness or there is tightness. This is kind of like a aha moment to a lot of people when they first realize that they're not actually tight but it feels tight. And what this kind of looks like is that imagine you can touch your toes and you've never lost really any flexibility in your hamstrings.

And you can do a seated toe touch and that's all good but it always feels tight. It feels tight. But if you compare that to your normal, which is probably your other leg, it is not actually tight. The reason why this is significant is because it narrows down a little bit better of things that may end up helping you. So let's just say you have a hamstring that is actually tight, like it's limited in range and it also feels tight because it is tight. In that case, things like hamstring stretching may be really helpful to you because you have to expose the tissue to a little bit of tension and elongate it and so on.

Let's just say your hip or hip flexor is tight. Say the hip capsule is tight, like the areas or the fascias, the ligaments, the tendons, the muscles around the hip are actually tight. In that case, stretching or doing soft tissue work specifically on those tissues may be very helpful because they actually are tight. But what if they weren't tight? What if you were a dancer, which does happen. There's dancers who feel like their hamstrings are tight and they feel like their hips are tight and grippy. That's why they have something called dancers say that it feels tight, grippy and painful. Now, this is not to say they're tight at all because they're not.

They're way more loose than you and I and they still feel tight. So in that scenario, there's not a reason to necessarily do looseness treatment. You're trying to do more of a stabilization treatment. Okay, so now let's boil down into the people who feel tight but aren't really tight. So those people tend to need a little bit more core stability. Those people will probably feel tight because they feel their hamstrings working extra. Other things that may help too are glute facilitation or hip dominant exercises. A lot of you may have run into things like single leg RDLs, stiff legged RDLs, hamstring, Swiss ball roll.

They got roll outs, right? Hamstring curls on a Swiss ball, heel digs. Long lever bridges. These are all things that are kind of hamstring dominant. But remember, the reason why it feels tight is because they are working too much. A lot of you have been, if you've been running and been active forever, you've probably learned about the anterior pelvic tilt. You've probably learned about glute muscles that are off. You've probably learned about abs that are weak. Hip flexors that are too tight and so on. And so the hamstring is typically one that becomes either tight or feels tight because of excessive workload.

So that lower cross syndrome is a good general observation. It doesn't hold weight in all scenarios. But for those of you who feel like your hamstring is tight, consider the things that are actually typically not helping in a lower cross scenario. You can Google lower cross, by the way. And we do have some videos on this on our website too and on our YouTube. So you can search those as well. I'll see if I can find one and put in the link description as well. Now, when we're trying to decrease the amount of hamstring activity, the easiest thing to do is pick the two biggest players in pelvic position.

And that's going to be the glute max. And it's going to be the abdominal or the anterior abdominal wall, which is going to be rectus femoris, can be the obliques, transverse abominus. It could be all of them because it's all part of the same wall, just different layers of it. Now, if I were to get technical with things, there's a little bit more to it than this. There's internal pressure involved. So if you read some of the other books that we have out for you guys to learn a little bit more from, I'll put some links as well. It goes over that concept. But in simple terms, if you look at people in a sagittal plane perspective, which is slicing them in halves, like in two equal halves from right to left, we can see that the anterior toe happens because of weakness of the glute max and the anterior or front abdominal wall.

Some of you may be thinking, well, what about the glute medius? Yeah. Forget the glute medius. Forget it. It's overrated. If you get the glute max, you'll get the glute medius too, but there's no need to do glute medius exercise for most people, unless you're like a post-operative hip. You just do glute max ones. And so this brings me to a story of a friend that I have that he had ongoing hamstring things for, I want to say like three, four years. I didn't see him for a lot of years. And so it was, it was interesting because we had met originally when I was doing a technique called active release at a, at an event.

It was an Ironman event and he was running in the Ironman event. And so he had hamstring tightness that he came into the booth for. And so naturally we would work on the hamstring. We'd try to loosen the hamstring. At that time, I didn't realize there was a difference between feeling and being tight. But I think if I look back, he was probably more so just feeling tight, but I saw him about 10 years later. We didn't touch base for a while after those like two, three years. And I asked him how things are going. He's like, great. He's like, remember when I first met you, I had that hamstring thing.

I said, yeah. He's like, that's all gone now. I was, I was amazed by what helped. I said, what helped? He said, deadlifting. I said, okay, how so? He's like, my glute max was off. I said, okay. I said, weren't you deadlifting before? He's like, yeah, but I was doing single leg RDLs and stiff-legged things to target the hamstring. So I guess I needed to just lift something heavy and use my glutes. I said, yeah, that makes complete sense. And so he found that out years later. So he suffered with this thing for about three to four years because someone wasn't looking. Namely myself. And also he was too focused on what felt tight and what he thought needed to be treated with manual care and stretching when that, which actually was more of an activation or poor, poor support type of problem.

Now, I have no idea if he did a core activation. I didn't ask, but the glute max is a big, big one. And so one thing that we really like people to do, at least to stop the feeling of tightness and get back to the normal running routine is going to be deadlifting. Now, I've seen various runners over the years, a lot of them, and various different events and distances and so on. And I'd say pretty often, I don't want to stereotype, but pretty often people who do distance running are terrible at hip dominant patterns. They're terrible at deadlifting. They're terrible at their single leg RDLs, but they do them.

But very rarely do I ever find them doing it with good enough form where I feel like I want to hand them something a little heavier to really challenge the pattern, which is what exercises or strength training is all about. So, most of the time, we need to correct form. Many of them have a round in the lower back, which maybe there's some debate if that's correct or not, but let me put it this way. If we're trying to load a hip dominant pattern to strengthen the glutes or the hips, you can't really round the back. Like, you can't make it a back lift. If you make it a back lift, your back's going to do the work, and it robs the work from the hip.

So, what's the point, right? So, you got to make it a hip dominant move. And same thing goes with your single leg hinges and so on. So, personally, I prefer to take just one or two heavy lifts in the beginning and just show them options to do. I don't like to make, I don't really, when I show like single leg RDLs and if I decide to load it up, I don't show them like hip airplanes and then like B stance and then single leg RDLs and rear foot elevated ones. Like, I don't, I just usually pick one or two. And I pick the ones that are the easiest to coach, not for me, but for them, like that they retain it the best.

Because, what's the point in showing a funny exercise if, if the form's not going to be right, we're not going to get the right benefit from it. So, deadliftsing is a big, big part. And so, if you have been suffering with hamstring tightness or the feeling of tightness, reach out to us. We have something called the Discovery Session, which is $29 at this point for 30 minutes. So, you can discuss all your problems and so on with us. We have virtual and in-person services and we're licensed in different states as well. So, please reach out to us, 714-502-4243 or email info at ptsportscare.com. We'll see you guys next time for the next show.