Are My Tight Hamstrings Causing Knee Pain

Are you wondering if your tight hamstrings are causing knee pain in your knees? I’m going to be talking to you today all about why hamstring problems can be causing any pain problem. My name is Dr. David Middaugh. I’ve been helping people out with knee problems for years. I’m a specialist manual physical therapist over at El Paso Manual Physical Therapy.

Tight hamstrings is something that we see in just about everybody with knee problems. But we help them out with these tight hamstring issues. And of course, their knee problems resolve, and they get back to doing all the things they love to do.

One of the first questions that we get from our clients with knee problems is, how can tight hamstrings hurt my knee? And the answer to this is simple. Around the knee joint, there are a ton of muscles that attach the calf muscles in the lower leg. The front of the thigh has what we call the quad muscles, and then on the back of the thigh or the hamstring muscles, and up in the hip joint.

There’s a bunch of muscles around the hips, the glutes, the hip flexors, that abdominals influence the hips as well. All of these muscles have to be in a proper balance in order for the forces going through the knee joint to be normal so that it’s healthy, and there isn’t any aggravation of the knee in any way.

But if you feel that your hamstrings are tight, then chances are there’s some muscle imbalance somewhere. And it’s changing the forces within your knee and leading to some discomfort. Now, it may not be the root of the problem, the hamstring tightness, but it’s a sign that there’s something going on.

Then the next question that people have, after I’d given that answer is, why do hamstrings get tight? Well, this answer is, it goes back to the muscle imbalance most of the time, and about seven out of 10 people who have tight hamstrings with a knee problem, it’s a glute muscle weakness. The butt muscles are weak, or they’re not doing their job, they might actually be strong, but they’re not working at the right times.

And the hamstrings are typically the first muscle to begin to take over the stability and all the activity that the glutes aren’t doing. And you can get by like that you can still walk and run and do all the things that you might need to do, except that it’s with the wrong muscle group. And over time, it begins to press on the cartilage, it can begin to irritate nerves, it can mess with the ligaments and the tendons around the knee joint.

If this goes on for years or even decades, you might get arthritis or other conditions that people commonly get in the knee. But it’s not necessarily the hamstrings fault, we look more so up in the hip or even down into the foot. Sometimes there’s foot issues that contribute to the hamstrings wanting to take over more.

If the glutes are not active enough, then the hamstrings because we’re the next muscle next door to the glutes, if you go down the leg, they tend to take over and cause some bad forces around the knee joints.

Of course, the next question that we get from our clients is what do I do about my tight hamstrings? How do I strengthen my glutes or do I even? What’s next? So what we tell our clients is, if you’re stretching your hamstrings, because most of them are stopped stretching, it’s not the first thing to do, and you don’t want to aggressively stretch your hamstrings.

One of the bad things that can happen if you are aggressively stretching your hamstrings, you want to stop it right now. There’re reflexes inside of muscles, when you start to stretch a muscle harder you go, if you reach a certain threshold, a certain point of stretching, there’s little reflexes that go off inside the muscle that actually make the muscle want to contract.

So if you stretch your hamstrings real strong, real hard, the muscle will actually want to shorten. And that’s not good because you’re going to be working against yourself on the stretch, you might actually start to stretch out the tendons or injure the muscle somehow. So it is not a good productive thing in the long term, it’s going to make your hamstring even tighter.

The other effect of stretching is it doesn’t last very long. If you do a proper stretch, you do a kind of light and you actually do get a lengthening effect. That can happen and it might give you some short-term pain relief. But it isn’t going to solve the knee pain problem. We’ve got to address the knee pain problem at the root.

Which like I said, and seven out of 10 cases it’s up in the glutes. We’ve got to strengthen the glutes. And a really neat thing happens once we start to get proper use and strength of the glute muscles is the hamstrings on their own calm down. They free up and it normalizes the forces at the knees so that the cartilage isn’t being compressed, the meniscus isn’t being torn, the tendons the ligaments are all fine and your knee starts to feel better be good.

It begins to become easier to get up out of a chair and walk. You can stand longer and walk longer. You know if you go to the store, you’re not having to lean on the shopping cart so much to offload the knee. It just helps the hamstring out so that it in turn takes pressures off the knee joint.

If you’re suffering from tight hamstrings and your knees hurting you on top of that, of course stop stretching them right away. If you’re doing that, let’s look at strengthening your glutes. There’re tons of videos on our blog on or you’re probably on our website right now after there, go over to that little magnifying glass on the top right corner, and type in glute, or glutes, and you’ll find glute exercises in there.

And if you’re thinking that you want to hire us to help you with your knee problem, that’s probably the fastest way to get over this knee problem that makes sure that your hamstrings are normal so that you’re not suffering with a knee problem longer than you should and potentially building up arthritis. And we want to make sure that everybody stays off the path to getting the surgery, avoid injections and doesn’t have to rely on pain medications to just walk as long as you want or go up and down steps or get up out of a chair and feel normal and not have to hobble a little bit.

So if that’s you’re thinking of hiring us, then you need to go and hit the cost and availability button up at the top of our website here, find the tab there the option that says cost and availability, you’ll get taken to our page where you can leave us your details. Want to get all your details there, one of our staff will give you a call back as fast as possible. And we want to just hear about your specific need problem to make sure that it’s a type that we can help out.

If we can help it out. Then we’ll tell you what the next steps are after that. If we can’t help you out, we don’t want to waste your time we’ll send you the right person so that you can get your any problem taken care of as fast as possible. I hope that we can be a part of your success story real soon. Have a wonderful day. Bye