Never Ending Hamstring Tightness...What’s the Solution?

Ever feel like you can never stretch your hamstrings enough? You try and you try and you try, stretch after stretch, every day without any change? I have your answer as to why your hamstrings aren’t improving.

Before we can dive into why stretching isn’t helping you, we need to first understand why your hamstrings are feeling so tight in the first place.

The hamstrings are long and strong muscles that start at your sit bone (the bone you feel when you are sitting down), run along the back side of your thigh and attach just below your knee joint. In PT school, they really emphasize that the primary job of the hamstrings is to bend your knee, which it does, but I would argue that the hamstrings are even more vital in stabilizing your pelvis.... but then again, being a pelvic floor therapist, I love bringing everything back to the pelvis 😉

Being that they attach on the pelvis, the hamstrings can help pull on the pelvis in one direction but that also means that if another muscle(s) is pulling on the pelvis as well, they can be impacted.

We often note that one or both sides of the pelvis is tipped forward. This was further discussed in a previous blog post if you are looking for more info. When this occurs, the sit bone part of the pelvis is being pulled up and taking along with it, the hamstring. This is now putting more pull on the hamstring and elongating the hamstring muscle beyond it’s neutral length. An overly elongated muscle is already at it’s max stretch and just doesn’t have any more length to give. So, when you feel like you have tight hamstrings and stretching isn’t doing the trick to improve the tightness, it’s time to further assess the pelvis’ position itself.

A brief video demonstrating how the position of the pelvis can impact the length of the hamstrings

A pelvis that is in a tipped forward position (either one half of the pelvis or the whole pelvis) then creates a domino effect. It’s common that we find really tight hamstrings (as previously noted), tight back muscles in the low back and also midback, difficulty getting breath expansion into the back and increased pelvic floor symptoms. Why more pelvic floor symptoms? Well, as discussed in the scissor vs barrel blog post, a tipped forward pelvis redirects pressure towards the front part of the pelvic floor making it likely you would experience more difficulty with stress incontinence (leaking with coughing, laughing, jumping, etc) and possibly even more symptomatic with prolapse.

What can you do about this? The best thing you can do to treat this chronic elongation is to learn how to contract your hamstrings at the proximal end (the start of the muscle on the sit bone). One of my favorite exercises to start clients in with this is to have them lay on the ground with their feet on the wall. Without moving the feet, imagine you are sliding your heels down the wall. In doing this, you should feel your pelvis curl underneath you slightly, lifting your tailbone up and lowering your low back onto the ground. Once you’ve mastered this in the wall position, it’s time to practice in different positions.

If you found this post helpful, please comment and share with others as I love educating the community!

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