The tendons and muscles at the back of your thighs run from your hips to just below your knees. They are crucial for extending your legs back and bending your knees. If you overload them, it may cause injury; so what can you do to stop this from happening?
how do i...?
How do you best look after your hamstrings, to prevent them becoming injured? Dr Bruce Paton is a consultant physiotherapist with a specialisation in lower limb musculoskeletal disorders, trauma, orthopaedics and rheumatology at the Institute of Sport Exercise & Health (iseh.co.uk). He advises: “Your hamstrings need to be strong, especially in outer length and eccentrically. They also need to be flexible.”
Dr Paton suggests several ways you can ensure you’re looking after your hamstrings. “Pace your running and training, especially with regards to high-speed sprinting bouts or interval sessions,” he says.
“In addition to this, make sure you warm up well before running at full speed, ensure your kinetic chain is strong (your calf, glutes, adductor muscles and trunk) and address any asymmetries in strength.”
Hamstrings are a muscle group made up of three muscles in the back of the thigh. They originate on the ischial tuberosity (sit bone). The biceps femoris travels laterally with muscle fibres running diagonally (with a short head attaching to the fibular head on the lateral side of the knee). The semitendinosus, which has a very long tendon and small muscle belly, runs medially to attach on the front and inside of the tibia. And the semimembranosus is the largest muscle, with a wide tendon, which also runs deep and diagonally. Its tendon attaches medially on the inside and back of the top of the tibia.
Other muscles like the adductor magnus run with the hamstrings and work together with them. “The hamstrings have long tendons, intramuscular tendons and muscle tendon junctions to help with the large forces they exert,” explains Dr Paton. “These long tendons generate elastic energy.”
The hamstrings work as a group to flex (bend the knee) but also to straighten the body up when bent at the hips (foot grounded). Working individually, they can also rotate the tibia (inward or outward).
“Hamstrings are a horizontal force generator in running,” he says. “They work to slow the leg and shank down at the end of the swing phase of a running stride, as the leg is slowed in order to ground the foot for foot strike.”
Your hamstrings work across foot strike with the other muscle
