One of the most common injuries to athletes and generally active people alike is a hamstring pull or strain.  Often the first impulse is to stretch that hamstring, and often that is not necessarily the best option.

In our modern lifestyle, many of us spend a lot of time in a seated position.  Whether that is sitting at a desk through the workday, sitting through a day at school, or sitting down and decompressing at night.  That seated position flexes your hip and your knee, tightening your hip flexors on the front of your hip, and your hamstrings on the back of your thigh.  This tightness and shortening of the muscle inhibits their antagonists:  in this case the glutes and quadriceps.  So when this individual begins activity like jogging, the glutes, which should be doing the work, is turned off by the tight hip flexor.  That forces the hamstring to take over a job that it should not be doing, resulting in an injury.

So in order to correct this common problem, and to prevent injury a few things should be done:

1.              Stretch your Hip Flexors:

·      PROCEDURE

·      While keeping a slight forward lean of the torso, tighten the core and contract (tighten) the glute of the leg with the knee on the ground

·      Maintaining this posture, shift the entire body slightly forward

·      Exhale and hold the stretch for two seconds

·      Relax and repeat

2.              Strengthen your glutes:

·      Lying Glute Bridge

o   Procedure:

§  STARTING POSITION

§  Lying face up on ground with arms to side, knees bent, and heels on ground

§  PROCEDURE

§  Lift hips off the ground until knees, hips, and shoulders are in a straight line

§  Hold 2 -3 seconds, return to start position and repeat for prescibed number of repetitions

§  COACHING KEYS

§  Do not let back hyper-extend

§  YOU SHOULD FEEL IT

§  Working mainly your glutes and secondarily your hamstrings and low back

Performing these two exercises consistently will correct a misalignment in your posture, turn your glutes back on and allow them to fire properly.  In turn reducing your risk for a hamstring injury by leaps and bounds.