Top 7 Tips To Get Long-Term Relief From Tight Hamstrings

In this video, I’m going to give you the top seven tips to get long term relief from tight hamstrings. Freeing up tight hamstrings is so difficult because it’s more than just stretching them. The first thought that people think when they have tightness anywhere is to stretch it. And this is predominant in the healthcare field, even amongst my own colleagues, physical therapists, they think if something’s tight, then stretch it.

And there’s a lot more depth to look at which I’m going to cover in this video, your neck. So here’s my first tip, glute strengthening, helps increase hamstring flexibility. And here’s why this is important. The glutes, the muscles right here in the back of your hip, and the hamstrings have the ability to do the same motion called hip extension where you’re moving your leg backwards like this, they can both be involved in that motion.

But if your hamstrings are tight, if you feel that they get tight on you, then it’s very likely that they are over compensating for weak glutes. In other words between the glutes and the hamstrings, below them, the glutes aren’t strong enough to provide enough hip extension so the hamstrings are overpowering the glutes and doing more work than they should.

And the reality is, hamstrings shouldn’t even be the primary muscle involved in that motion, it should be the glutes, so getting stronger glutes then should allow the hamstrings to quiet down so that they’re not so tight all the time. So now that I said that, you might think okay, I’m going to go do glute strengthening exercises. But a problem that people run into when strengthening their glutes is that they can’t help but activate their hamstrings to even in simple motions.

For instance, do this right now sit down or stand up wherever you’re at, and try to tighten up your glute muscles, your butt muscles, squeeze your butt muscles, tighten them up, make them stiffen up. See if you can do that without activating your hamstrings give it a go hold it for 10 seconds are your hamstrings working?

If they are chances are when you go to the gym or you do some glute dominant exercise, you’re probably inadvertently activating your hamstrings too much. We’ve got some videos on how to strengthen your glutes without using your hamstrings so that you can focus on the right muscle. You can go check that out in the description below.

Number two tip is to avoid directly strengthening your hamstrings. This is a follow up on number one because if you’re focusing on a hamstring strengthening exercises, and not putting enough emphasis on the glutes that are right above it, then you’re going to put yourself in a situation where your hamstrings want to tend to activate over the glutes when the glutes should be doing most of the work, the strongest muscle tends to fire right away.

Even if it’s not the muscle that’s supposed to fire. There’s something called sequencing in the body and whenever you’re moving your hips. Generally your hip muscles should be the ones firing not your thigh muscles. But if you end up firing your thigh muscles when your hip muscles are supposed to be working first, then you’ve created an over dominance and you’re going to keep your hamstrings tight.

Now there’s a chance that you could get your hamstrings so tired during a specific hamstring workout that they actually loosen up, free up and calm down. And it’s really because they’re just so tired that you feel like you can use your glutes better in the moments after that workout where you worked out your hamstrings.

But what inevitably happens afterwards is the hamstring bench strengthens over the next couple of days and it again becomes a dominant muscle group. So isolated hamstring exercises really aren’t the best thing if you’ve got tight hamstrings. Tip number three abdominal strengthening also alleviates hamstring tightness. Let me show my skeleton.

What I mean by this let me give you a quick explanation abdominals are on the front right here they attach from the ribs to the pelvis bones, and then hamstrings run right here from the butt bone the sit bone down to the back the sides of the knee. If your abdominals are weak, then what it tends to do on the front here is allow your pelvis to tip forward tip in this direction which pulls up the seat bones right here the butt bones which adds length to your hamstrings.

This added length can come off as tightness in the area. When in reality it’s that your hips are too far tilted forward your pelvis to too far tilted forward. And if you get your pelvis to tilt backwards and arrest in that position, move from that position, then you should be able to alleviate hamstring tightness for the long term.

Tip number four, avoid quadricep exercises in order to get looser hamstrings. What I mean by quadricep muscles in case you’ve never heard of that it’s the muscles that are in the front of the thigh the ones that are right here on this part of my leg. These muscles work together with the hamstring muscles to counteract the effects of each other.

So if I’m straightening out my knee, the hamstrings here control how fast my knee straightens out. That might be a difficult concept to get and honestly a lot of healthcare professionals really don’t understand and that they think that the muscles just oppose each other, meaning one straightens out the knee and the other bends the knee.

But when you’re straightening out your knee, the rate, the speed at which it’s straightening out, is heavily controlled by the hamstring muscles. So that means that if you get stronger quad muscles, and you tend to use your strong quad muscles all the time, like whenever you’re walking, running, exercising, being active in general, then inevitably, your hamstring muscles tend to get stronger, tighter as well.

And that tends to give you the feeling of tightness in your hamstrings back here on the back of your thigh. Tip number five, avoid aggressive hamstring stretching, like I just said, at the very beginning of this video, everybody tends to think that if something feels tight, then go stretch it and that gives you some relief. Now, light, easy stretching can actually be beneficial to loosen up the hamstrings.

But when I say light stretching, it’s kind of ambiguous, people don’t really know what I mean. I mentioned this to patients all the time. And we always have to clarify it. So let me just clarify it for you right now. If you had to put the intensity of your stretch on a scale of zero to 10, zero, meaning nothing at all, you feel zero stretch, and 10 meaning a stretch.

So intensity, if you go one notch further, you’re going to tear something, generally, I recommend that you stretch within the zero to three phase zero to three end of that scale. If you’re stretching past the three like to 4, 5, 6 and beyond, then the stretch starts become too intense, and you actually work against yourself. And here’s why this is gets a little sciency a little medical here, there’s some structure some cells inside your muscles and tendons of your hamstrings.

Inside the muscles. They’re called muscle spindles. And inside the tendons are called Golgi tendon organs, you can look this stuff up. All you need to know about this without getting too sciency is that these cells are responsible for protecting your muscle and tendon from being overstretched. And what they do when they detect that they’re being overstretched.

When this stretch gets really intense and aggressive, they send a reflex to the body to make that muscle begin to contract and work against your stretch. Which means that if you stretch more intensely and activate these Golgi tendon organs and the muscle spindles, then it tends to make the muscle actually get stronger, rather than lengthen out and truly stretch.

So that’s why I’m telling you stay on the lighter end of the stretching scale, so that you can actually be productive with your stretch. And what you need to know about these stretches is that they only bring short term relief. Just like I said, the beginning of the video, there’s more to it than just stretching.

Stretching can be beneficial on the light end, but it’s truly just short term, you’ve got to go fix the muscles that I’ve talked about to get more long-term benefits strengthening the abdominals, and the glute muscles helps tremendously at calming down those tight hamstrings.

Tip number six is massaging your hamstrings can help increase hamstring flexibility, temporarily, very much like a light stretch. If you get in there and massage your hamstring muscles occasionally feel them right where it’s tight. If you just dig in with your fingers like this for about a minute on each side, because you have an outer hamstring on the back of your thigh.

And you have an inner hamstring on the inside part of your thigh on the back, then you can begin to free up the muscle and it’s real simple, you don’t have to make it complicated at all, you can just sit somewhere where your thighs partially off the surface that you’re sitting on and just dig in there and rub it if you want to get a little bit more advanced, getting a percussion massage gun can make a heck of a difference.

And save your hands from that work as well. Got one here to show you real quick, what that would look like if you’re going to use it. Just switch it on. There we go. Put it on the third setting here. And you would just push that into your hamstring feels great. And go about a minute or two really as long as you like, as long as you’re not aggravating anything.

There’s a slight chance that sciatica could be causing your tight hamstrings, it does happen. And if you do have a nerve problem using a device like this wouldn’t be the best idea because it can flare up nerves that are irritated vibration is something that is known to irritate nerve problems. But if it’s just stiff muscles, it was just tightness in your hamstrings.

This should be beneficial to work the inside of the muscle, you would just go like that. Do you want to see the gun that I’m using here go down to the description below. And you can see a link to Amazon where I got this gun. Now since this is temporary relief, you wouldn’t want to rely on this to make your hamstrings looser for the long run. But this can assist you in calming down those hamstrings.

So that when you start to exercise the right muscles, the hamstrings aren’t taking over so much. Now tip number seven is what I’ve already mentioned but I want to hammer this home. It’s addressed the root problem. Hamstrings get tight because they are compensating for other muscle groups. Let me repeat that hamstrings get tight because they’re compensating for other muscle groups.

That means you can’t just stretch it away, you have to get the other muscle groups that are weaker and not doing their job to strengthen up so that those hamstrings can say, okay, I don’t have to compensate for these guys, I don’t have to pick up their slack. I can just relax now, not to be so tight all the time, because I’m holding your body up, keeping you balanced, keeping you moving and not doing something that’s going to make us get hurt.

If you get those weaker muscle groups stronger, your hamstrings will relax and it’s usually the glute muscles, the butt muscles and the abdominal muscles that need some help. And it’s very often that people that have hamstring problems, end up with lower back pain problems, hip problems and knee problems as well because the hamstrings influence all those joints, all those areas very directly because of their attachments to the areas and we do have some online programs that can help you out with addressing the root problem.

We have the 20 days back health and wellness boost program. If you’ve got more of a back problem with tight hamstrings and you want to address the root problem, go check that out. And then we’ve also got a 28-day knee health and wellness boosts problem this is for people suffering more so from knee problems, but are also experiencing tight hamstrings.

Both of these programs are designed to get to the root problem with the bias on back problems and a bias on knee problems of course, so you can go check those out learn more about them down the description below. I hope this video was helpful for you. If you’ve got any questions, drop them in the comments below or just say hello in the comments.

Let us know if this helped you out or not. And give us a thumbs up if you thought it was helpful. share it share a video with somebody you think needs to see this. Don’t forget to subscribe and I’ll see you in the next video. Bye friends