Why Are My Hamstrings So Tight?

Whether it is sitting, walking or running, the pain caused by tight hamstrings is rather hard to ignore. The only upside to this is that you’re not alone. As frustrating as hamstring tightness may be, it is seen often in practice, and effects all from active athletes to the couch potatoes.

Whenever we experience all this tension in the back of our legs, our first instinct is to try and stretch that area and relieve some of those symptoms (stiffness and pain). Unfortunately, this type of approach does not address the primary cause of the problem and only provides short term relief. In this way, a day or two later, you may be in same predicament as before, or even worse off.

Every day we perform movements that require us to extend our hips in many different ways. To execute these functions the glutes act as the primary hip extensors, while the hamstrings assist. The glutes act as the powerhouses that propel your body forward when you get up from a chair, run across a field, or climb stairs. So, if the glutes are dysfunctional, weak, or not firing correctly, the hamstrings have to compensate by getting more involved in these everyday movement.

This overuse of the hamstrings will eventually cause them to fatigue and become tight and tender. Now as mentioned before, our first inclination is to stretch these tight muscles to try restore flexibility. This however, is only a temporary solution. Only by improving hip function, through glute strengthening can we prevent hamstrings from becoming chronically tight and dysfunctional.

One of the biggest contributors to glute dysfunction is - too much sitting.

How many hours a day do you sit? Sure, you might be an “athletic type” who is able to run a 5km without breaking a sweat. But if you’re working a 9-5 office job, chances are you sit at a desk all day long.

When you add that to time spent in the car, scrolling through Instagram (damn millennials), and binge watching Netflix, it’s easy to see you spend more time on your glutes than you do moving them.

Sitting for long periods weakens the glutes in two ways.

One is inactivity: the glutes need to move to stay healthy. The other is a chain reaction caused by sitting too much: the hip flexor muscles in the front of each hip contract and tighten, and tell the nerves to inhibit or turn off the muscles that provide the opposite motion — the glutes. This phenomenon is called altered reciprocal inhibition, and as mentioned before, inactive glutes equals overactive hamstrings. If you think too much chair time might be contributing to your pain, one of the best exercises for tight hamstrings is to be mindful of your seated position and make time to stretch throughout the day. Take a lap around the office every 30-45 minutes, stand up or go outside during your lunch breaks, and do some stretches while you’re chilling and watching TV.

On that note it is important to focus on strengthening exercises for the glutes and the core as opposed to stretching exercises, which would be used for the “tight” muscles like the hamstrings or hip flexors; This strengthening is preferred if you want to avoid putting more slack on the already weak and stretchy muscle group!

Tight hamstrings are hard to kick (excuse the pun), but if you stretch and strengthen and listening to your body, you can prevent future back pain, knee pain and even foot pain usually associated with hamstring stiffness.

Cheers,

Team Hughes Chiropractic

(Blog post is written from a combination of my experiences and the various research I have read over time).