The hamstrings play a pivotal role in postural alignment, impacting everything from pelvic tilt to the curvature of your lumbar spine. Hamstring flexibility is a requirement for postural alignment, well-being, and athletic performance. Whether you’re an avid runner or recovering from injury, the importance of developing and sustaining elasticity in your hamstrings is universal. Incorporating different ways of stretching your hamstrings can positively influence your daily activities if you are someone who deals with chronic hamstring tightness. This article will review difference techniques for hamstring stretching, including passive stretching and quad activation.
Take me straight to the techniques to try!
**This is not medical advice. Please consult your medical provider for more information.
Understanding the Hamstring Muscle Group
Understanding the anatomy of your hamstring is crucial in recognizing its pivotal role in your movement and overall musculoskeletal health. The hamstring muscle group is composed of three different muscles known as the biceps femoris, semimembranosus, and semitendinosus. These muscles extend the hip and flex your knee. Because this muscle group has influence over two joints, it can have a big impact on posture. Tight hamstrings can affect pelvic tilt, and ultimately, the lumbar spine. It’s key to highlight how tight hamstrings can lead to a posterior pelvic tilt and even encourage a decrease in the natural curvature of the lumbar spine.
This chain reaction not only affects your posture but can also be a contributing factor to musculoskeletal pain. It’s a domino effect where hamstring tightness restricts your mobility, but can also negatively impact your posture too. Overly tight hamstrings can change how we stand and walk. Because of it’s influence over the knee, it can be challenging to stand or walk due to the limitation of straightening the knee. On top of that, tight hamstrings can pull on the pelvis, creating more of a posterior pelvic tilt, which then influences the lumbar spine. This is how tight hamstrings can actually contribute to low back pain!
The issues that stem from stiff hamstrings are not limited to just this region alone. Over time, if left unaddressed, this can cause issues further up and down the chain. This means that if the knees are not fully straightening and if the pelvis is constantly being pulled into a posterior tilt, this can eventually affect the calves, feet, or even the upper back and neck!
The Importance of Flexibility
Maintaining flexibility, especially in your hamstrings, is more than just a component of a well-rounded athlete. It is a requirement of moving through daily life with ease. When you have tight hamstrings, you’re not just inhibiting your ability to sprint or jump. You’re potentially skewing your postural alignment.
Measuring Your Flexibility
To determine if you have tight hamstrings, there are two different ways we can test this. First, lie on your back and pull one knee towards your chest until your knee is directly on top of your hip, creating a 90 degree angle from your trunk to your leg. Start with your knee bent. Then, slowly straighten your knee and extend your leg up towards the ceiling without moving your hip. If you can straighten your knee to at least 30 degrees from being perfectly straight, this is considered an acceptable hamstring length.
Another way to test this is to stand with your knees straight and bend forward trying to reach your hands to your toes. If you can reach your hands to the front of your ankles without bending your knees, this is an acceptable hamstring length. If you are unable to either either one of these tests or both, you should be working on your hamstring length.
Incorporating Flexibility Into Your Daily Routine
Incorporating hamstring stretches and exercises into your daily routine doesn’t require drastic changes to your schedule. Simple, yet effective, strategies that are performed consistently over time can help improve your hamstring extensibility. This will help aid in injury prevention, make it easier to perform daily tasks, and enhance overall athletic ability.
If you are a regular gym-goer or have a scheduled time to workout at home, give yourself a couple of extra minutes to stretch your hamstrings before and/or after your workout. Even a brisk walk on the treadmill for 5 minutes to warm yourself up will help bring bloodflow to the area and help many different muscle groups feel “looser” and ready to go.
Desk workers can set an alarm a few times throughout the day to either stretch or change their positioning. Sitting for long periods of time is a main culprit of shortened hamstrings. Place a stool under your desk or a chair on the opposite side of your desk so you can prop your feet up from time to time. This extends your knees, keeping them from being in a flexed position for 8-10 hours a day. If you set an alarm, standing up for 30 seconds or moving around for a minute can help prevent your hamstrings from getting tight from sitting all day long.
If you would like to spend even more time on flexibility, incorporating Pilates or yoga once or twice a week can significantly improve your range of motion. Remember, consistency is key to improving flexibility. By turning these small practices into daily habits, you’ll notice a significant improvement in your hamstring flexibility and, possibly, even your posture.
Other Articles Related to Hamstring Flexibility
- Chronic Hamstring Stiffness? Here’s What You Need to Know
- Unlock Your Inner Thigh Tightness and Move More Freely
- Top 5 Full Body Stretches for Outdoor Athletes
- Mobility Therapy: How Can it Help Me Move Better?
- 7 Mobility Stretches so You Can Make it Through Your Day Pain Free
Variations of Stretching and Mobility Techniques
Stretching your hamstrings is more than simply trying to touch your toes, whether sitting or standing. There are different ways to stretch, believe it or not. Lets review these techniques. Test them out and see which works best for you.
Static and Dynamic Stretching
These are your two most common stretching variations. Static stretching is when you hold a position for a period of time. Imagine sitting with your legs extended straight out and trying to reach your toes without bending your knees or flexing your spine. This would be an example of a static hamstring stretch. This allows the muscles to slowly elongate and can be fundamental in improving muscle extensibility. This type of stretching is good after a workout during a cool-down phase.
So what are you supposed to do during your warm-up before the workout? This is where dynamic stretching comes into play. Dynamic stretching prepares your muscles and joints for exercise by putting them through their full range of motion and increasing blood flow. Dynamic stretches involve movement, which is why they are good as a warm-up. They prepare the muscles for activity by bringing blood flow to the area, which helps reduce the chance of injury. Examples of dynamic stretches for the hamstrings would be forward leg swings or a movement flow switching from a plank to downward dog. Holding the downward dog position would make this a static stretch. Movement between a plank into downward dog and back is key for making it a dynamic stretch.
Passive/Dynamic Stretching Vs. Neurodynamic Techniques
Traditional passive stretching has long been the cornerstone of improving flexibility. It’s where you stretch the hamstrings without any active contribution from the muscle itself (such as with dynamic stretching). This method is straightforward and can be easily incorporated into your daily routine.
Neurodynamic techniques introduce a dynamic component to stretching, aiming to utilize the nervous system to influence flexibility indirectly. Unlike passive stretching, which focuses solely on the hamstring muscle, neurodynamic techniques consider the interplay between muscles and the nervous system. And the difference between neurodynamics and dynamic stretching is that dynamic stretching targets the muscles while neurodynamics targets the nerves. Incorporating neurodynamic techniques could offer a more comprehensive approach to stretching. By addressing both muscular and neural aspects of flexibility, you may find a more balanced improvement in your hamstring’s range of movement.
However, it’s not just about choosing one over the other. The key takeaway here is the potential benefit of integrating multiple methods into your flexibility regimen. Trial multiple options. See which works best for you.
Reciprocal Inhibition Through Quadriceps Activation
Traditional methods for improving flexibility has mainly been passive stretching. Adding in quadriceps activation (reciprocal inhibition) may help improve hamstring flexibility more than passive stretching alone.
Reciprocal inhibition occurs through a reflex arc in the spinal cord. By activating a muscle group on one side of a joint, this allows for relaxation of another muscle group on the other side of a joint. For example, if you contract the quadriceps (front of the thigh), to accommodate for this, the hamstrings (back of the thigh) will relax. With the hamstrings more relaxed, they can gain better range.
Give this a try: sit on the ground with your legs out straight in front of you. Let’s stretch the left leg. You will bend your right knee and let it fall out to the side as if you were doing a butterfly stretch. The left leg will stay out straight in front of you. Keeping your left knee straight and your back straight, lean forward at your hips. Once you feel a stretch in the left hamstring, contract your left quadriceps by pushing your knee down into the ground. You should feel a strong contraction in your quad. By activating the quad, this creates and sends a signal to the spinal cord which tells the hamstrings to relax. This allows you to get a deeper hamstring stretch.
How to Implement These Techniques
There are many individuals who suffer from hamstring tightness. Especially with the amount of time spent sitting nowadays, hamstring tightness is all too prevalent. Staying on top of hamstring extensibility is important, but it will take consistency. Consider incorporating a variety of different exercises. Better yet, learning to incorporate them throughout your day and creating a routine makes it easier to implement and stick with it. Here are a few steps you can take to start incorporating this into your own routine!
- At Work: If you work a desk job, taking frequent standing or walking rest breaks breaks up the monotony of sitting with your knees bent over long periods of time. Try sitting with your legs straight by letting them rest on another chair or a stool in front of you. Switch between keeping your knees bent and then sitting with them straight. You can also easily incorporate a seated hamstring stretch throughout the day to target this muscle group specifically.
- Prior to Workouts: Start with reciprocal inhibition. Sit on the ground with one leg out in front of you. Keeping your back straight, lean forward from your hips and begin to feel a stretch in your hamstrings. Once at this spot, transition to quadriceps activation. This involves trying to straighten your knee – feel the quads turn on when you do this. Hold this contraction for 5-7 seconds. Then, relax the knee and lean forward slightly more. You should be able to lean forward more due to the hamstrings relaxing through quadriceps activation.
- Cool Down: After workouts, passive stretching of the hamstrings can be beneficial for cool downs. This can be performed sitting down on the ground or lying on your back. While sitting on the ground, extend one leg out in front of you keeping your knee straight. Lean forward from your hips while keeping your spine neutral until you feel a strong but comfortable stretch in your hamstrings. You can also perform this by lying on your back and using a stretching strap and pulling your leg (with your knee straight) towards your face. Either way you perform this, hold the stretch for 30 seconds up to 3 times.
By performing various types of stretches throughout your week, it makes it a lot easier to incorporate into your routine. Sometimes performing 3-5 sets of stretches every day and thinking about blocking out time for them can seem like a daunting task. Although quite easy, tasks throughout the day can easily overload us. Try to slowly habit stack and work small changes into your routine. Maybe you only start with standing every 30-60 minutes during your working hours. Over a week or two, it will become easier and easier to do because it becomes engrained in your routine. Then, you can slowly start adding on top of this. Before you know it, you’ll be easily adding in your hamstring stretches without even thinking about it!
References
Alshammari F, Alzoghbieh E, Abu Kabar M, Hawamdeh M. A novel approach to improve hamstring flexibility: A single-blinded randomised clinical trial. S Afr J Physiother. 2019;75(1):465. Published 2019 Apr 23. doi:10.4102/sajp.v75i1.465
TL;DR
Hamstring flexibility is crucial for maintaining optimal postural alignment and mitigating musculoskeletal pain. Combining techniques such as passive and active stretching, and reciprocal inhibition significantly enhance flexibility and are aimed at treating hamstring tightness effectively.
