How To Manage And Prevent Recurring Hamstring Issues

Audio Transcript

Tim: Hello! My name is Tim. I’m 56 years old. I have been running for well over 30 years, relatively consistently and average around 25 miles a week, usually. I try to do as many races as I can, some as fun runs and some as a serious competitor. I’ve never had problems with my hamstrings in my entire life, until last summer during a 15K race.

A few miles into it, I either pulled a muscle or strained the hamstring pretty significantly because I encountered severe pain, and wasn’t able to run for a couple of months. I was able to work myself back into decent running shape, did a half marathon in early December, but at the end of December, after an easy six mile run, the injury returned.

I’m just looking for some advice to keep this from being a chronic problem, and any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.

Tina Muir: Firstly, you want to treat this hamstring and get all that scar tissue out. This is something that I understand because I had a hamstring issue about three years ago and I know how frustrating it can be. It doesn’t ever seem to want to go away.

I wondered at one point if I was going to be stuck with this hamstring pain for the rest of my life. Thankfully, I can now say that mine is completely gone, so I am confident you can also get rid of yours Tim.

The first thing you want to make sure you do,is get some therapy on it. You need to get a massage. I actually found active release and greystone helped a lot, so I recommend that you look in your area, to see if there’s someone who you can go to for that. If they work with runners, that’s even better. You want to get that worked out as much as possible.

It’s going to be painful, and they’re going to have to break that scar tissue down that has formed, but it should make you have a lot less pain in day-to-day life and in your running initially.

You also want to consume lots of healing foods. There are plenty of them around. We have a great article with 27 healing foods for runners, but some of the biggest ones are sweet potato, tart cherries, beets, salmon, almonds and blueberries. Those are my favorite ones, so I would try and get as many of those in as you can.

Then one of my favorite things that I now do, every time before I run is, to use a glute activation exercise. Turning on those glutes is going to be the biggest thing in keeping this hamstring from overworking in the future or having it come back. One of the best ways to do this is to find a strength coach if you can, because as I mentioned before, mine is now gone and that is thanks to my strength coach.

I realize though, that not everyone can have a strength coach. If you don’t have someone who you can go to, you need to figure out how you can turn on those glutes and get them to take the load of the work rather than your hamstrings.

When it comes to strength training, some of the biggest exercises you can do are glute bridges and adios. Adio is a bit of a weight lifting term and I didn’t even know what that meant before I started training myself but if you look it up online, there should be plenty of videos of how to do an adio correctly. You should feel that turning on your glutes specifically, and glute bridges as I mentioned are very, very important.

We do have a high hamstring tendinopathy article on the RunnersConnect website, and that is going to explain how to do the glute bridges if you need that. Again, that will be on runnersconnect.net/blog. Use the search bar to type in hamstring, and it will come up.

You want to start with glute bridges as you are lying on the ground, doing the exercise but if you can progress up to using weights with a bar across your hips, that is only going to help strengthen those glutes. However, make sure that you have someone to help you do that because if you do that incorrectly, you will be putting yourself at risk of injury.

So glute activation before running is very helpful. I have a video on my website, and if you want to use the search bar for glute activation, you can find it at tinamuir.com which is an exercise I personally use before every run. I find that helpful for turning on the glutes just before I go but you can also do a set of glute bridges or a set of adios if you like.

When it comes to preventing hamstring injuries and making sure those hamstrings are prepared for the future, you want to add in some eccentric hamstring exercises. When I say eccentric, that means the complete opposite motion to running basically. Your body’s ability to slow down the movement.

An example of this would be a Nordic curl so that would be where you get someone, a loved one or a workout buddy, to kneel on the ground and hold your feet. You then keep your hands at your chest, cross them over and try to lean forward without dropping to the ground. You want to try and slowly lower yourself to the ground.

I understand that your logical self doesn’t want to allow you to slowly lower and you want to just let go and use your hands, but as much as possible, for as long as possible, you want to use your hamstrings to slow you down, as you move towards the ground. If you’d rather put your hands at your sides, you can do that too.

Another one that’s a little safer is to do what my strength coach calls [shelks 06:42]. I’m not sure if that’s the correct term, but that would be where you put your feet on the ball. As you’re lying on the ground, you put your feet on the ball, lift your hips up into a straight line from your knees down to your shoulders, and you slowly roll the ball in towards your hips. You want to have the ball a bit further away from you and then roll it in. It’s hard for me to explain but again, that article is on the RunnersConnect website and it explains how to do these curls with your hamstrings.

If you can do it with one leg, that’s going to help but if you need to do it with both legs to start with, until your hamstrings get strong enough, you can do that too. The best way you can learn is by looking at the images because it’s kind of hard to describe it otherwise.

Finally Tim, I would try to avoid speed for a little while because speed is going to fire those hamstrings. I discovered that that really aggravated my hamstrings initially. You want to make sure that you keep doing the glute bridge and the eccentric exercises for as long as you can, to prevent you having that hamstring injury again.

When it comes to more extreme treatments, you can get a steroid injection and a surgery as a last resort. I recommend against those, as they can do more harm than good. If you check that hamstring article that I’ve previously mentioned, there’s been a lot of discussion at the bottom there and a lot of people have given things that have worked for them but it seems like surgery hasn’t helped people that much.

Hopefully, this has answered your question Tim. I want to thank you all for listening today. If you have enjoyed any of these episodes, I would love if you could go to iTunes and leave us a rating and review. The reviews only help us to move up the running podcast ladder and we would greatly appreciate it especially as a new podcast.

I hope you have a great week and look forward to hearing your question next.