#hamstrings | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

chuckg2 · 4 months

Text

Savannah Prez

456 notes · View notes

leekeyrouz · 5 months

Text

703 notes · View notes

necarion · 9 months

Text

It's kind of amazing how universal the physical therapist (and biomechanics-based trainer) community opinion is on "don't stretch your hamstrings". This is in contrast to most of my sports coaches and PE instructors, who had us do hamstring stretches constantly.

The best explanation I've seen for "don't stretch your hamstrings" is that "your hamstrings are tight" is usually a symptom of something else, usually weak (or inactive) glutes, but sometimes also weak hamstrings. They can also be a result of tight quads (which probably shouldn't be stretched either). Also, a lot of folks who go to stretch their hamstrings end up stretching their ligaments (bad) or sciatic nerve (bad, and also hurts like hell). The latter is why hamstring stretches were always so miserable to me; I wasn't even stretching them! In general, if stretching [your hamstrings, among others] really hurts, you might be doing a nerve stretch instead and you should stop doing that.

Much of the PT community seems pretty resistant to passive stretching. They'll support active stretching, where you resist the stretch at every point along its range. That seems to allow the muscle to relax by encouraging it to fire first and then relax. (And it seems to work for me.) But when a muscle is tight or sore, it tends to be that the tightness and soreness are a result of something else working incorrectly (obvious exception for "this muscle is sore because I worked it really hard yesterday").

#physical therapy #hamstrings #stretching

936 notes · View notes

stretchmarkedmuscle · 3 months

Text