How to really, really get your hamstrings to work
I love to experiment in partnership with clients. Sometimes you just need to play around with various combinations to get the right mix!
Take a look at this progression with a client of mine with knee pain and missing outside hamstrings.
I have covered this topic recently- the blog was titled: How to fix inside of the back of the knee pain and had a video of one way of addressing the missing outside hamstring.
This is another way to get that outside hamstring to work.
Knees + Hamstrings
First of all, know that I am obsessed with hamstrings lately- they seem to make such a huge difference to knees and hips when they are all working properly. By all working properly I mean all three hamstrings- there are three of them back there!
This photo above is of my client Lana attempting to beat her quads into submission by lying in plank on the roller, and then do a hamstring curl.
Seems simple enough, right?
However, we kept noticing one problem: her knees and feet loved to wiggle in all sorts of directions. We want them to TRACK straight ahead. The wiggle wasn’t allowing her outside hamstring in particular to engage and was causing the other two hamstrings to cramp.
Sidebar: do your hamstrings cramp?
This may be why – you are down to two working actively rather than three.
Our goal was to perfectly track the knees and feet, and not allow all this wiggling and rolling around. If it happens on the roller, it happens also when she stands up and walks around.
So, we decided to band up various body parts with the Perform Better mini bands
We started with just her feet, but noticed that they both turn out, as does her right knee.
That wasn’t right.
Then we tried banding her feet and her ankles. Feet looked beautiful- totally tracking straight ahead- but her knees were still sliding apart. No bueno.
Then we tried banding her knees, and her feet. That worked beautifully! Knees tracked straight ahead, as did her feet.
However, the next time we got together, we tried all the bands with just her feet and ankles and noticed we were back to square one- her feet weren’t tracking nearly as well as I had thought. What was the problem?
Oddly enough: No shoes!
I love to workout barefoot as much as possible. But the lack of shoes in this case was allowing the feet to wiggle apart again. The shoes allowed the feet to have some kinesthetic sense of each other and gave the feet some width and tracking guidance.
Additionally, it was much easier for Lana to put her shoes on, band up her knees, then band up her feet and put her feet together WITH shoes on, and know what they were doing in space.
Notice once you climb onto the roller, you are looking away from your feet and it can be tough to know exactly what those feet are up to. Eliminating all of those variables allowed us to focus back on her hamstrings, and *viola* all three hamstrings kicked in again.
How to really, really get your hamstrings to work
Let me know about your hamstrings in your comments below. Are all three working? Poke your fingers in the outside area of the back of the leg and see if you can feel all three!
