3 Reasons Why Strengthening Your Hamstring Makes Knee Pain Worse

In this video I’m going to tell you three reasons why strengthening your hamstring makes knee pain worse. This information is especially helpful if you suffer from knee osteoarthritis, meniscus tears, cartilage injuries, especially behind the kneecap type of cartilage injuries, ligament injuries, like ACL tears, MCL tears, those are the two most common, as well as other knee problems like Baker’s cysts, and IT band syndrome, which affects the knee. And this information is also helpful.

If you’ve had a knee replacement, and you’re still having pain, it’s been 6-12 or more months, years even after your knee replacement. I’m going to get into those three reasons right now. But I just want to tell you that at the end of the video, we’ll also be telling you two points at which hamstring strengthening is technically okay.

But they’re very small points of time, very small spans of time, during which you would actually have to do hamstring strengthening the rest of the time, you don’t need to do it. And here’s why. Reason number one hamstring strengthening trains that hamstring muscle inappropriately. Now this takes a little bit of thought. So follow me closely here, I’m going to get my leg model.

Here’s the leg and you got the foot right here, kneecap right here, this is the right leg, the quad muscles are on the front of the knee, they attached to the kneecap and the hamstring muscles are on the back of the thigh, and they attach to the sides of the knee. Now when you’re walking and taking steps, your body should be using your glutes primarily to push your entire leg backwards as you move your body over your legs.

So you can progress yourself forward when you’re say walking. Your hamstrings really should not be doing a ton of work. Now this is contrary to popular belief, it’s contrary to what’s taught in schools, about the hamstring muscles, bending your knees. So you would think that when you take a step, and then you start to pull your leg this way that it’s the hamstrings stretching or I’m sorry, shortening right here and hamstring strength is required to propel you forward.

But it’s really a secondary muscle in that action. The glutes are the primary muscle in that action, the role that the hamstrings play, follow my words closely or this can get a little wordy. It’s to decelerate the acceleration of the quads. Now let me put that in simple terms. When you swing your leg forward to take a step your quads have to contract a bit to allow your lower leg to swing forward and land appropriately on the ground.

But in the subconscious motions that you’re doing when you’re walking, as you take small steps to or small deviations in your steps, maybe you rotate your foot, you take a slightly shorter or a longer step or if you’re encountering uneven ground, we’re going up and down stairs, the hamstrings work to counteract the acceleration or the action of the quads. So it kind of controls the quads.

Another way to think of this is brakes are important to a car you can’t have an accelerator in the car, the gas pedal, without having the brakes they they’re complimentary to each other if the quads are the gas pedal than the hamstrings, or the brakes. So this being said, I’m not going to dig into this more because this can get very philosophical depending on what side of healthcare you’re on, would it people take sides with this stuff.

What I am telling you here is that if you focus on strengthening your hamstring muscles, then you’re training your body inappropriately because most strengthening exercises involve you lying down something like this on the machine very typically and you’re bending your leg just like this and that is nowhere near what walking looks like.

You should be using your hamstring. With the glutes with the quads, calf muscles, all the muscles in the leg should be coming together with the hamstring, the hamstrings just one part so to train it independently and focus on getting a lot of hamstring strength is going to send you in the wrong direction it’s going to train it inappropriately.

Now the second reason you need to know why hamstrings strengthening makes knee pain worse is that strengthening your hamstrings adds to the compression at the knee joint. If you think of all the muscles that attach around the knee joint, they cross the knee joints.

The quads are the most dominant ones very typically they attach to the kneecap, but the hamstrings they come from the bottom of the buttock right here and they run to the sides of the shin bone right here. And if they get very strong, they pull the shin bone up into the thigh bone, which adds excessive compression and that without having adequate glute strength up top sets up that knee joint for moving with constant overpressure in the knee joint.

That’s what leads to osteoarthritis in the knee over time. How cartilage injuries meniscus tear There’s, it’s what sets up ACL tears in youngsters as well. If you’re dealing with a flare up of one of those tissues, a ligament, cartilage, the meniscus any of those tissues in the knee, usually taking pressure off the knee joint gives it tons of relief.

So backing off of hamstring exercises tends to be helpful. Now hamstring exercises, when done immediately rarely produce any sort of discomfort or pain. But think of it this way, if you ate a slice of cake, right now, you’re not going to immediately get diabetes, or if you smoke one cigarette, you’re not going to immediately get lung cancer. It’s the cumulative effect of that activity that builds up the problem.

Same thing with this, if you chronically have strong hamstrings, that’s something that you’re feeding into, then you are going to chronically have overpressure in the knee joint. That’s what sets up the chronic problems. The third reason why hamstring strengthening is not good for knee problems is that hamstring strengthening feeds into existing muscle imbalances.

Most of the time, when it comes to these knee problems, I’ve been talking about Baker cysts, cartilage injuries between the bones right here, the meniscus tears, those kinds of injuries, osteoarthritis, there’s been an excessive pressure. And the reason for the pressure is because of imbalance of muscle forces from the hip, in the thigh muscles in the calf muscles and even foot muscles.

But if we’re talking about the muscles in the hip and thigh area, most often it’s the quad muscles that are over dominant, the second muscle group in the area that becomes overly dominant very often is the hamstrings, there’s so much emphasis put on quads and hamstrings strengthening. And it makes sense at face value.

Because those are the muscles that directly can influence the knee if you’re sitting down and just stretching and bending your leg like that. But how often do you have to do super forceful activities in normal everyday things. I’m not talking about the gym. Because if you go to the gym and you get on one of these machines, you might say, I do it every day I do leg extensions and knee curls all the time.

But in walking in squatting in going to do things at home going to the store doing your normal job. Most jobs don’t involve forceful activation of your quads, or hamstrings in isolation, it’s usually a combined motion of everything, all the muscles and they’ll have to work in the proper balance in order to put the proper forces through the knee joints.

So if you’re isolating your hamstring exercises, you’re feeding into the imbalance that’s making these hamstring muscles stronger than they should be, which is going to add the compression and only make it more challenging in the future for you to control your knee joint glute strength up top is of utmost importance for you to be able to control your knee properly.

And having tons of glute strength allows the pressures inside your knee to be more normal and not over pressurize the cartilage and meniscus and put your ACL MCL or your ligaments in a bad position. It also takes pressure off or the Baker says problems and the IT band problems on the outside of the hip you can get TFL overuse, which is a tensor fascia Lata muscle, it’s a muscle that’s right here on the front of your hip outside front of the hip. And it commonly gets overused with the quadricep muscles that it bandha connects into the TFL muscle runs down into the outside of the knee. And that can also over pressurize the knee joint.

Now let me tell you two times when hamstring strengthening is okay, I would actually say go ahead, go start doing it. If you have just had a knee surgery, or a hip surgery, sometimes even an ankle or foot surgery, basically, if you had any sort of surgery, or another thing is a traumatic incident, you know where like, well, you broke a bone.

Maybe you didn’t have to have surgery, but you had trauma to your legs somehow. Oftentimes, the muscles in the area where you had the surgery or had the trauma won’t work normally right after the injury or after the surgery. And you might have to isolate out some muscle activity in that specific muscle in this case, maybe your hamstrings so that you can get the muscle to wake up and work better on command.

That’s the first time that I would say yeah, you need to work on that muscle. Even though I’m telling you this whole video is about not working out the hamstrings. The second time would be right after you start to get activation. After having had surgery or some trauma, you do probably need to get strength especially if it’s been a while since the trauma or the surgery. If it’s been more than a week you’ve lost strength.

If it’s been a month or more, you’ve lost a lot of strength if you haven’t been working on it already. So you might actually need to do some isolated strengthening movements for your hamstring if you’ve never done it right after having had surgery or a trauma. But once you feel like your motion is full range in your knee again and in your hip, that’s typically a sign that your hamstrings are going to be working properly.

And if you’re back to walking decently maybe you’re still using a cane or a walker but you’re doing more and more walking. Then you’re probably out of the clear where you need to be focusing on hamstring exercises, and this is where the problem happens very often people that have had a knee surgery like an ACL reconstruction or a total knee replacements, or there’s all kinds of other surgeries out there meniscus repairs, they stick to doing hamstring exercises in definitely.

And they go to the gym and do weighted hamstring exercises, and they’re just feeding into the muscle imbalance, adding a bunch of compression to the knee joints. And they’re training inappropriately, that they’re training their hamstring, not the way that it’s designed. You should be doing more dynamic activities, maybe even pursuing things like walking or running when the time’s right, so that you can train your hamstring properly.

Squats are another very functional exercise, meaning you do that all the time, you always have to squat up and down from chairs, in and out of vehicles up and down from toilets. Having the ability to squat makes all points of your life tremendously easier. So there’s a very applicable movement to do in the gym. If you’re looking for other exercises to do and more detailed information about things like osteoarthritis, Baker cysts, meniscus tears, ACL tears, you can find links to playlists that are all about those specific conditions down in the description below, as well as information about our 20 A Day Knee Health And Wellness Boost Program.

This new health and wellness boost program is focused at addressing the root muscle imbalance that I’ve been dropping throughout this whole video getting the glutes to be stronger while not overworking the quads and of course the hamstrings. That is a root problem of all of these issues. I hope this video was helpful for you drop a comment below if you’ve got a question or want to share something we’d love to see that, and I hope to catch you in the next video. Bye