If like me, you love to lace up your or and hit the trail regularly, you might find that your hamstrings are feeling a little tight these days – especially if you’re not great about stretching regularly. Running and hiking place load your hamstrings – a collective term used for the three muscles that run down the back of your thigh from your sitting bones to the back of your knee – and that’s not a bad thing. Adding load to muscles helps make them stronger, and strong leg muscles assist with balance as well as your ability to perform everyday functions like standing.
Until it doesn’t. Overloading your hamstrings, whose job it is to bend your knee, doesn’t make the muscles shorter – it just feels that way. What it can do, however, is inhibit the ability of your hamstrings to move through their full range of motion – by nature, hiking and running move your knees and hips through a fairly short range of motion and when you do these movements on repeat, it can mean you feel pretty stiff when you go to put your shoes on in the morning.
I’ve been teaching yoga for 15 years, mostly to athletic populations, and unyielding hamstrings are something I see a lot of. You don’t need to have any aspirations to get your leg behind your head for tight hamstrings to be an issue – because your hamstrings originate at your pelvis, when they grow tight they can hold your pelvis in a posterior tilt, and that has knock-on effects. this can lead to postural issues, lower back.