Why Stretching Your Hamstrings May Be Reinforcing Pain Instead of Helping It

This past weekend was the 15th annual Missoula Marathon – a race that has earned the title of one of the top marathons in the country. I want to extend a huge congratulations to all our friends and family in our community who participated in and finished the full or half marathon. It’s always amazing to see everyone’s hard work pay off.

If you participated and found yourself with lower back, hip, knee, or even ankle pain, it might be linked to over-stretching your hamstrings!

One mistake we see very frequently with athletes is overstretching their hamstrings. What if I told you that your hamstrings are tight because of your posture? The ticket to making them feel and function better is to actually “activate” them and reorient your hips so that your hamstrings can actually get some slack.

You should probably stop stretching your hamstrings.

Hamstrings play an integral role in movement mechanics, far more than just helping bend your knees. They attach in the back of your pelvis and play an important role in extending your hip, helping you drive your thigh bone back to propel yourself forward (think walking/sprinting). They also assist in rotating the leg inwards and outwards.

Potentially most importantly, your hamstrings serve as stabilizers for your hips. When they stop doing their job effectively (which can be due to a number of factors), your pelvis will dip forward at the top and lengthen your hamstrings further making them feel tight. This can increase flexion and curvature of your spine, which can cause compression and pain in your lower back region. This is called Pelvic Anterior Tilt. If you’ve been to a physical therapist about your lower back or even lower extremities, odds are you’ve already been exposed to this concept.

Often as a result of an extended spine position, your ribs will lift forward, putting your diaphragm in a poor position for breathing. This can lead to pain or postural issues in your shoulders, upper back, neck and even jaw. Believe it or not, stretching your hamstrings could be increasing your risk of headaches!

This photo helps demonstrate the importance of keeping a better balance of lengthening and shortening your muscles to help hold your skeleton in a more advantageous position.

The ticket to making them feel and function better is to actually “activate” them and reorient your hips so that your hamstrings can actually get some slack.

You should probably stop stretching your hamstrings.

Hamstrings play an integral role in movement mechanics, far more than just helping bend your knees. They attach in the back of your pelvis and play an important role in extending your hip, helping you drive your thigh bone back to propel yourself forward (think walking/sprinting). They also assist in rotating the leg inwards and outwards.

Potentially most importantly, your hamstrings serve as stabilizers for your hips. When they stop doing their job effectively (which can be due to a number of factors), your pelvis will dip forward at the top and lengthen your hamstrings further making them feel tight. This can increase flexion and curvature of your spine, which can cause compression and pain in your lower back region. This is called Pelvic Anterior Tilt. If you’ve been to a physical therapist about your lower back or even lower extremities, odds are you’ve already been exposed to this concept.

Often as a result of an extended spine position, your ribs will lift forward, putting your diaphragm in a poor position for breathing. This can lead to pain or postural issues in your shoulders, upper back, neck and even jaw. Believe it or not, stretching your hamstrings could be increasing your risk of headaches!

This photo helps demonstrate the importance of keeping a better balance of lengthening and shortening your muscles to help hold your skeleton in a more advantageous position. 

As you can see, it makes sense that when the hamstring is lengthened it can feel tight, often leading athletes intuitively to stretch them more. All we’re doing during that stretch cycle is convincing your brain that it’s okay for that hamstring to lengthen even further, diminishing the muscle’s ability to do its job and help stabilize the pelvis.

If your hamstrings do feel really tight, it’s likely your quads and hip flexors are the muscles that are in a shortened position and probably need some lengthening. This makes sense given how much most people sit each day. 

Steps You Can Take

Stretching can be an effective short term fix, particularly for your quads and hip flexors. But there are studies that suggest we’re not very capable of making long term changes to the physical length of our muscle tissue through passive stretching.

Instead, here are three different ways to address your hamstrings in your workouts to get to work on those pesky tight hamstring and any surrounding aches and pains.

Step 1: Improve Your Positioning

Your posture plays a huge role in muscle function and your ability to control your skeleton in an optimal way. More specifically, how you breathe can dramatically affect your posture and muscular function. This breathing exercise can help you adjust your hip position in relation to your ribs, improving your posture driven by your diaphragm and reestablishing some very important core muscles.

This is an exercise we learned from The Postural Restoration Institute called 90-90 breathing and it can help improve that breathing function and pelvis positioning. You’ll notice in this exercise, we’re actually trying to give your hamstrings some engagement so that your body can use them to pull your hips back into a better position. This works in conjunction with some deep core muscles and your diaphragm to move your pelvis back into a more neutral position, which should in turn give you both better hamstring engagement and provide them with more slack so that they don’t feel as tight.

Check out this video on how to perform 90-90 Breathing to start repositioning your hips and ribs.

You can test the efficacy of this exercise yourself. Try lying flat on your back and lifting one leg at a time, keeping it straight and raising it towards the ceiling until your hamstrings stop your progress. If they stop before you reach 90 degrees, perform this exercise twice for 8-10 breaths at a time. Then retest. 

If your leg goes past 90 degrees, that would suggest they’re too loose and you probably need some strengthening to improve your hamstring function. We’ll address that in step 2.

Step 2: Resistance Training

In my opinion, strength training most muscle tissues through a full range of motion with proper form and appropriate load is a far better option for restoring mobility and function than stretching.

For the hamstrings, you’ll want to address their different functions in different ways so that you can improve their function and mitigate injury risk. Improving hamstring function through proper compound lifts is probably most important. This means making sure that you are performing variations of squats and deadlifts consistently in your strength programs. I recommend keeping both bilateral (two feet) and unilateral (single leg) variations in your workouts consistently over the course of the week. 

Locking in your form and improving your squats and deadlifts should be your first priority in the strength realm before adding in a variety of accessory lifts because your brain needs to learn how to integrate your larger muscle groups in the movement patterns so they can all work together more efficiently.

Accessory work to address other hamstring functions individually is also important, but more so for the health and integrity of the tissue. As you add in accessory work, think about separating knee flexion and hip extension and addressing each of those individually. 

Knee flexion is pretty simple because it’s still a single joint movement, so you should be able to cycle through different versions of leg curls and get an appropriate response. We perform them here at Revo with swiss balls, floor sliders, bands, and ankle attachments to weights. If you’re in a larger gym, leg curl machines can be a great option. 

For hip extension exercises, your form will be really important to ensure you’re not using parts of your lower back, calves, or even your quads/hip flexors as a compensation for poor positioning. Good examples of exercises for hip extension can be different variations of bridges, reverse lunges, Romanian deadlifts, kickbacks, and hip lifts. We’re very big advocates for hip lifts because you can still add a lot of load to the lift (your hamstrings are STRONG!) while keeping your injury risk low.

For both knee flexion and hip extension, there is one very important form note to make. You have to make sure to keep your ribcage stacked over your hips. What I mean by this is make sure you do not extend your lower back (excessive arch) resulting in your ribs sticking out. Picture lumbar support pads in cars or office chairs. Those are NOT HELPING. When you are in that position, your nervous system will struggle to find and use your hamstrings. You must keep your ribs down and your abs engaged or else you will continue to struggle to find your hamstrings and may reinforce movement patterns that can lead to lower back pain.

Which is just another reason why making sure you work those obliques and transverse abdominal muscles is so important. They help keep your ribs in place which should lead to better hip position – thus better hamstring engagement. So keep up with those side planks and bear crawls!

Step 3: Sprint!

The final step to not only great hamstring function but incredible overall fitness markers: go out and sprint! Sprinting should be considered a basic human function but once most people graduate from youth sports it is disregarded.

Hamstrings play a huge role in sprinting and keeping sprints in your programming will not only help restore better hip extension and stride efficiency for runners, but it will certainly help restore hamstrings of steel.

If you haven’t sprinted in awhile, you will need to work back up to it. So the first step is to add plyometrics to your routine. Then, I recommend adding in short bursts of sprints up a moderate incline hill. This can be easier on your knees, just make sure to walk back down. As you build resilience and work capacity, you can make your intervals longer and transition to a track for true sprint workouts.

Putting It Together

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it’s unlikely you’ll be able to properly restore your hamstring function on your own. A second set of eyes can be really helpful because often we’re competing with compensatory muscles firing and it can be very difficult to discern those yourself. And if you’re looking to build up to sprinting, there’s appropriate steps you’ll want to take before getting to those. 

We can help! Reach out today and whether you’re in Missoula or finding us through other means we can help get you back on track and moving better than ever in AND out of the gym.