Sebastian Brosche · 8 min · 1,531 words
A sport-physio guide to rehabbing a strained, pulled or torn hamstring from grappling. Safe steps to get back on the mats.
Hi there Joel Kreska, sport physiotherapist. Today we're going to go over what to do when you strain, pull or tear a hamstring. As sport physios, we commonly see it happen in sprinting sports such as sprinting, soccer, those kind of sports and we might see it in kickboxing if someone overextends their leg. In jujitsu specifically, we see it where people get stuck in an over-under pass or they get double under stacked or you know say stacked in a triangle or those kind of things and they can't or choose not to tap.
And so the muscle is contracting as it gets lengthened out and that's where we start to see injury. Now contrary to what you would think you have to do, the worst thing you can do is to stretch it and there's two reasons for this. One, if it's just a muscular injury, you've got a muscle that's, let's just pretend there's a tear and the tear pulls the muscle apart like this. So there's a little gap there.
Your body's sort of built-in mechanism is going to be to cut the fibers that are still intact are going to contract and try to approximate those two ends so that they heal nicely and if we're yanking on that thing, it's going to pull them apart and that is not good for a healing process. We obviously want those things to approximate so that they can heal with the least amount of scar tissue or other weakness issues. And the other thing that we want to consider is that if we've been caught in a over-under pass or a stack, there may actually be a traction injury to the sciatic nerve. And so one of the worst things you could do in that scenario is to stretch it because you're further stretching something that was a stretch injury.
So basically what we want to try and do here is try to strengthen the hamstring and gradually build up strength in those ranges where we got injured. And so we're going to start out in a very neutral position and then gradually work our way up into a more sketchy or dangerous position, but we're doing it with contraction of the hamstring throughout. So we're fairly safe to do these things. So the first one we're going to do is lay on our stomach and we want to keep our hips pressed to the mat and pointed toes and we're going to flutter kick like so.
Now you can do this day one. It's absolutely safe. It doesn't seem like it would be safe, but it really is. It actually feels kind of good to get the muscle pumping.
Now I'm going to start out a fairly small amplitude and a fairly, you know, chill pace. But as I get going I want to have almost like this aggressive temper tantrum where I'm bringing my legs quite high and then I'm slamming the brakes on just before I hit the ground. And it's important to do that because we are teaching the muscle to fire eccentrically and that is basically slamming the brakes on which is one of the roles of the hamstring and we're doing in a very neutral position so it's quite safe. We're also working on getting the timing down of this muscle because if the tempo is at a certain pace that the muscle fires too late, then that's where you're compromised and you're going to get another injury in that particular area.
So the first thing we're going to do is start out with this nice and chill and get that flutter going. You might want to use music or a metronome or you can just kind of, you know, go at your own pace making sure that there's minimal or no pain and then as you get a little more tolerant to that load then you're going to put a bigger amplitude and a bigger snap on it when you hit the bottom. So that's the first part. The second part that we want to work on is trying to again eccentrically strengthen those muscles as they are lengthening and there's a really good exercise.
I quite like it. I call it a good morning. Everyone has a different name for it. I'm sure mine's wrong, but I've just always called it that.
But what I'm going to do is I'm going to stand with my hands on my hips and I'm going to have a little bend in my stance like this would be my injured leg and I'm going to slowly tip forward and back. Making sure that my shoulders are square and my hips are square and they never rotate. So as I come forward I'm not rotating like this. This is balance.
This is loading the hamstring. Okay. Now early on when I do this, I might only be going a very small amount. So again, I have a little bend in my knee to make sure that I'm not loading the sciatic nerve and I'm going to slowly come forward making sure that my torso and my back leg form a straight line almost like those foosball guys that you see.
And you'll notice, I don't know if you can see it right now, probably not, but I've got my elbow touching the wall. I'm not leaning into it, but I'm just making sure that I'm not dealing with multiple factors. I am not dealing with balance and eccentrically loading and stretching. So I'm just using my elbow as a pivot and I'm going to come down nice and slow and back.
Now you'll notice that as I get down into some of these positions, I'm now putting the stretch on this hamstring as I'm contracting it. It's really important to contract your hamstring as you're doing that and then come back up. I like to ask patients to be looking forward when I do that. So I keep my back straight.
I don't want to be looking down like this. This creates again, a really sort of faulty movement where I'm not active through the posterior chain and it makes it really hard to fire the hamstring and the glutes, which is what we're actually trying to train here. Now the last piece of this puzzle here is we want to like once I get to the point where I can get down close to say about 60 or more degrees, where I'm sort of matching what my other leg is doing. I then want to take, so this is the third one, we're going to take my leg up nice and high and I'm going to do a little kick.
Okay, like a front kick. Like I'm going to kick someone right in the in the privates. Now when I do that, I'm making sure that my knee is still and my hip is still and it's a front kick and I'm slamming the brakes on the brakes. Now, obviously we're not trying to cause pain here at all, but what we want to do is again get that tempo down as we do this.
Now some people, I certainly can't do it, but they'll have their knee up here and they can come all the way straight. Notice this as far as I can go. So I don't have any expectations that I'm going to be going fully straight, but if I need to be going fully straight, I drop my knee down and I'm going to kick that way and try and slam on the brakes in that position. And as we're doing all three of these exercises, I think it's really important to make sure that we're also working on our back rolls.
I call them segmental back rolls. We'll get into that in a sec, but what we want to try and do here is make sure that if I have an injury to my hamstrings, that I maintain my back mobility because I don't want to get stiff in that scenario because then if I get stuck again in an invert or a back or a an over underpass, then I'm going to injure this again. So again, we can take all the pressure off the hamstrings and even just work on back rolls like this. We can start to get into inverts up onto your shoulders and as you improve where we've done the what I call the good morning or the front kick, then we can start to work on lengthening our legs up and over.
So we're going to come up into that invert and straighten our legs and back down, making sure that it's not a passive stretch. We are active through our hamstrings so that we safely are teaching that muscle to handle more and more load. And then when we get back into getting on the mats, we're fairly confident that we are safe. I hope you've enjoyed this.
I hope it helps you get back on the mats if you've hurt your hamstrings. Have a great day and I'll see you soon.
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