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Hi everyone! Welcome to installment three of hamstring lengthening month. We started
off the month by talking about not shortening the hamstrings in the first place. Second
week we talked about forward bend, and how to stretch gently and hold it for a longer
amount of time to get more length out of the muscle. Today I want to show you guys a couple
of cheats that people tend to do when they don't have the hamstring length when they're
trying to do something. It's two objective markers that you can really take to any hamstring
stretch to make sure you're isolating the hamstring and not using other parts of your
body to get around the fact that you don't have the length to do whatever it is you're
trying to do.
The first objective marker is the leg. You want to keep your legs nice and straight when
you're stretching your hamstrings. No matter what stretch you're doing, if you're stretching
the hamstring, you want to have a straight leg. The second you bend your leg, you're
putting slack in the hamstring and then you're not lengthening it.
So when I'm doing a forward bend, the legs are straight. When I'm doing one of these
guys on the chair, i want to keep my leg nice and straight. Now I know I'm isolating my
hamstring.
The other thing that we want to look at, the other objective marker, is the pelvis. When
you don't have a lot of length in your hamstrings, what happens is that is actually can tuck
your pelvis under. So here I am standing with a neutral pelvis. I know that because my ASIS
is stacked vertically over my *** symphysis. More simply, I have a nice lumbar curve right
now. If I have really short hamstrings, it's going to drag down the back of the pelvis,
and you're going to see me lose that lumbar curve there.
If I start out with a neutral lumbar curve, and I start my forward bend hamstring stretch,
I'll know I've gone past my limit when Iose my lumbar curve. Yea I can get all the way
down to the ground, but not because my hamstrings are so flexible. I'm only able to do this
because I'm opening up my spine. It will be the same thing for a stretch on the chair.
You wanna keep the leg straight, and maintain your lumbar curve when your'e doing this stretch.
If I go all the way forward to touch the chair, you'll see that I lose my lumbar curve, so
now I'm cheating. I'm using my spine to compensate for the fact that I can't actually do this.
I'm going to want to stay up here. Now I'm working on my hamstrings. Here I'm just opening
my spine.
It's the same thing with a strap stretch, when you're doing a strap stretch, the same
markers apply. You want to have a straight leg, no bending in the knees, You also want
to have a lumbar curve here. As you pull the leg up towards you, if you feel your lower
back digging into the floor then you're tucking your pelvis. You can also see that, because
here's my ASIS, and here's my *** symphysis. Because I'm horizontal on the floor, these
two points should be in the same horizontal plane.
Here my pelvis is tucked. And there it's neutral. You can see that I have that curve again.
So that's it! When you're stretching your hamstrings, no matter what stretch you're
doing, make sure you're keeping your legs straight, and make sure that you have a lumbar
curve. That's it. See you next week.