Hamstring Strain Rehab for BJJ | Part 3 (14 min)

Just going to drop the stick to one side. And what we're going to do now is we're going to go into a reverse plank. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come onto my hands, heels on the ground, and then I'm going to push my hips up in the air. I want to try and get that nice straight line from my ankles through to my shoulders.

I can adjust how much weight I've got from each leg. Later on we'll start doing this with one leg to increase the load even more. But for now, two legs is fine. And rest there.

And then I grab the bench and I'm going to do some squats down to the bench. So the idea is this means I don't have to worry about going too low. I can set the bench at just the right height so that that feels relatively comfortable. If the chair I've got is a little bit too high, I want to lower it.

The easy way to do that is to put a book or something like that under your feet. And then I'm going to go into a reverse plank. And then I'm going to go back to the plank. Hands on the floor, heels on the ground, and then just lift the hips up.

Get that nice straight line. And then I'm going to go into a reverse plank. And rest there. Back onto your feet.

Do some more squats. If you want to make this harder, you can add some weight. So you can have a load in front. Or we can do it on one leg.

So I quite like a variation where you lower yourself down on one leg. And then you can do the same thing on the other leg. So I'm going to go into reverse plank. And then I'm going to lift up with one leg.

And lift up with two. Again, that's not something to do early on, but it's something that as the rehab plan progresses, is quite a nice way to advance this exercise. It doesn't require any extra equipment. And the final set.

And rest. And then we're going to do a reverse plank. Going back to the bench. As I mentioned before, the easiest way to adjust the difficulty of this exercise is just to change the height of the bench.

Or to raise your feet relative to the bench. And rest there. So for the final sequence in today's plan, we're going to use a light weight. So err on the side of caution with this, I would go with something very light.

Either a light kettlebell or as I said before, a shopping bag with maybe one bottle of water in it. Good place to start. It's very easy to increase the weight later once you've got the hang of the exercise. So if you remember the hip hinge movement we did with the stick earlier in the week, what we're going to do now is we're going to do that very same movement.

Keeping the back nice and flat. Just with that our light weight. Add a little bit of extra load to those hamstrings. So that's the last set of the set.

And then this is a great exercise and it's easy to make this as easy or as hard as we want it to be. As you go through the plan, once you've done it a few times, you might want to start increasing the load that you're using. Again, it's not an exercise that I ever want to go to failure on. I always want to keep a couple of reps in the tank.

It's an excellent one, both for the lower back, the glutes and hamstrings. Rest there. Pop the weight to one side. Now we're going to go into some static lunges.

So I like to start this from the ground. Back knee bent, front knee bent to about 90 degrees and my head is going to go straight up to the ceiling. So both legs are working with this. I want to make sure that I've got my weight roughly evenly distributed.

So plenty of weight on that back leg. Switch sides. Again, I can check my position on the ground first. I'm going to go up.

I'm going to go down. And then from there, I return to my weight. Some of you might recognise this as a Romanian deadlift. This is one of my favourite exercises actually for increasing hamstring length as well.

So when people say to me, I really want to increase my hamstring flexibility, rather than getting them doing loads of stretches, very often I'll get them doing this exercise because not only does it help with the range, with increasing the hamstring length, but it also gives you that extra strength as well. So I'm going to go down. I'm going to go up. Got my weight to one side.

Return to our lunges. Switch sides. And then for one final time, I'm going to repeat that sequence. So as before, if your hamstrings are starting to feel a little bit irritable at this point, it's fine to stop there.

But if everything's feeling good, we're going to do a third set. So, we're going to do a third set. Back to our lunge position. Again, make sure your head's going straight to the ceiling.

You're not tempted to lean forward over that front knee. Switch sides. And we'll stop there. So that's all for day three.

We'll see you back here next for day four. Some more exercises, some more advanced exercises, strengthening those hamstrings and getting you more back towards doing jiu-jitsu.