When ever we feel a pain or strain in the “back” of our leg, we usually think it’s a hamstring injury.  There are other muscles attached very close to the back of the upper leg/hip that are not hamstring muscles.  How can you tell?   If you have a hamstring injury,  usually when you flex your hip, you will feel a pulling/pain feeling.  Sometimes this feeling will almost feel like it is attached to your glute.  You can lie supine on a floor or table and just raise your leg.  If you feel pain or a pulling sensation, it is a safe bet that you strained or pulled one of your hamstring muscles or adductor magnus.  Adductor magnus you will usually feel more medial or inside the back of your leg.  If you internally rotate the affected leg while raising it in the air, and you feel pain, it probably is most likey adductor magnus. 

If you feel no pain raising your or flexing your hip, than it is possible you strained a quadricep muscle.  Yes, thats right, it can also be a quadricep muscle.  We often associate quadricep muscle strains with anterior leg pain but there are 2 quadricep muscles that is attached posterior on the leg as well.  Vastis Medialis is attached medial posterior on your femur.  It wraps around the inside of the femur to the anterior of the “tear drop” shape just medial and posterior to the knee cap.  Similiarly, the another quadricep muscle, the vastis lateralis is also attached behind the femur but is located slightly laterally away from medialis.   The best way to determine if you have strained vastis medialis  or lateralis is to flex your hip with a bent knee while standing.  Bring your bent leg down forcefully while internally  or externally rotating your foot.  If you feel tension or pain, it is most likely a vastis medialis or lateralis strain.  Another way to test is to stand and put yourself into a squat position.  If you feel tension on the way down, it is most likely a vastis medialis  or lateralis strain.

How does this impact our fitness regime?  First of all, weak muscles usually are the muscles that get injured.  Thats right, you heard it correct.  When we pull a muscle, it is because there are other muscles that are probably not doing their job.  When we feel tightness, it is a sure sign of protection from weakness.  This is why Muscle Activation can play such an important part in strength and conditioning the injured leg.  Through muscle testing, MAT can determine what muscle or muscles are causing the problem.  Another words, searching for the cause of the problem is well worth the time. 

When it comes to making someone faster, movement efficiency is the foundation. Can you get someone faster by getting them stronger without improved ROM? Absolutely, but the stronger an athlete becomes, the greater disfunction…unless the body is balanced. Lets take an athlete with very tight hip flexors. Getting this athletes hamstrings and glutes stronger just compounds the tightness of the psoas muscles and other muscles involved in hip flexion. Because of this antagonistic action that takes place…it becomes a viscious cycle. For example, if you increase your squat by 50 lbs, how many lbs of torque resistance have you increased on the hip flexors? As the athlete gets stronger and stronger, and in many cases faster and faster, hamstring injuries start to show up. And even when this athlete is relatively healthy, they are always feeling tightness in the posterior. Disfunction will start showing up in the adductors as well, because half of the adductors are also involved in hip extension. I often see back problems show up fairly early in younger athletes who show this kind of disfunction. Most coaches trained in yesterday’s knowledge, would say this is a hamstring weakness issue and they will work even harder which exacerbates the problem. They will do a ton of stretching which starts to cause even more disfunction…setting up a better environment for a massive hamstring tear.

So what is the answer? Balance. Allowing muscles to elongate to their full potential by increasing the range of motion of the myofascia. This is boring work and not as manly as getting into the rack and squatting a ton of weight. Whether squatting or performing deadlifts, the strong get stronger and the weak continue to get shorter and create more tension. Athletes feel inferior when you start getting them into positions of inadequacy. Especially when you start to see progress in ROM and they find out they have lost some absolute strength. Just getting ROM is just the first step, then learning to absorb force in the lengthen state comes 2nd, and finally, learning to create force from a lengthened position. This takes time and most good athletes who have experienced success are not willing to take a couple steps back. They would rather perform well, get injured, recover from injury, perform well, get injured. What takes place when an injury happens causes even more disfunction. We are the sum of all of our injuries…unless we go to the root of our disfunction.

I have worked with a number of high school and middle school athletes for over 15 years.  I have purchased just about every gadget in the book, from parachutes, bungee cords, jump shoes, speed shorts and the list goes on.  I probably could have a garage sale and most people wouldn’t have a clue what it was they were looking at.  I realized after a number of years that gadgets might have their place but not every athlete would benefit.  Sometimes I would get lucky and prescribe something that an athlete needed at the right time in their development.  It was purely coincidental…certainly no predictability.  Did I have any success with the athletes?  Sure, but it was hit and miss.  Some athletes got better and some stayed the same.   Over the past 6 years, I have trained and helped 7 individuals who have made it to the Texas State UIL track and field championship as well as numerous district and regional champions.  Here is what I have learned and in hopes you don’t make the same mistakes I have made.  The old saying is that a smart person learns from their own mistakes, but a wise person learns from someone else’s mistakes.

1.  Getting an athlete stronger doesn’t mean they will always run faster….unless the weak muscles are addressed.  Under traditional type of strength training, which I might add, I have left that party years ago, only reinforces the muscles that are already strong.  If you have weak glutes, and you decide to use a barbell squat or deadlift,  these exercises only will make the strong muscles stronger.  Compensations keep the weak muscles always rearing their ugly head.  MAT on the other hand, allows me to address weak deficiencies and muscles.  Not only do we look for weak muscles, but we also look for weak positions.  An athlete might have a strong muscle in shortened position, but what does his/her strength look like in a lengthened position?

2.  Most athletes don’t really understand what maximal velocity  or maximal effort.  Getting someone to run faster and challenging their nervous system beyond anything they have ever imagined isn’t natural for most athletes.   Learning to send impulses and sustain muscle contractions is not only a skill that must be developed but is a prequisite to getting stronger.  Many people believe that getting stronger makes you faster.  My observations agree with the late sprinting coach, Charlie Francis, that fast sprinting actually makes you stronger. 

3.  Running slow doesn’t make you fast.  Running fast makes you fast.  The same analogy can be made with strength training.  Lifting light weight doesn’t prepare you to lift heavy weights.  Does running slow make you slow?  No, but it doesn’t challenge your nervous system and you won’t progess unless your nervous system is challenged on a consistent basis.  (At least once or twice per week)

4.  Working on leg turn-over is the key to increased speed is the wrong road to go down.  There are a number of studies, most notably Peter Weyand, 2000, of  Southern Methodist University, by way of Rice and Harvard, has concluded that the swing rate of legs was no different from Olympic champions than average sprinter in high school.  Another words, why work on something in which it appears there is no significant difference between a trained professional and an amateur?  What we think we are seeing isn’t actually what is taking place.  The fastest athletes are not those that turn over faster with their legs, but rather they are on the ground less time.   People who run fast show muscle stiffness through the feet and legs.  Muscle stiffness can be defined by the muscles ability to react  and to absorb force.  Muscle stiffness can and should be trained for.  Strength training will improve muscle stiffness, but unless the weakest muscles and compensations are dealt with, energy absorbed at ground contact will be leaked  at the weakest links.  Picture a stiff spring pogo stick vs. a pogo stick that has loose springs.  In a race, it will be much easier to move faster with the tight springed pogo stick.  Why?  Because the stiffness is able to absorb the ground reaction forces and elastically rebound from the contact.  What happens if you have 2 pogo sticks that have stiff springs, but one pogo stick also has another spring half-way up the stick?  Contact times might be similiar, but over time, the spring placed in the middle of the one stick will cause stability problems and energy efficiency will be lost.  This is why we need to create a body that can absorb force throughout the body, not just the lower legs.

5.  Efficiency can make up for velocity.  However, when you combine both, you can  potentially run very fast.  What do I mean efficiency?  Muscles work in pairs.  For every muscle that shortens, (concentric contraction) another muscle muscle must lengthen. (ecentric)  This is why just strength training doesn’t mean you will get faster.  In fact, I have observed many athletes get extremely strong in the squat rack, and find that their 40 yard dash time has declined.  Why would this happen?    If an athlete shows compensation(s) under maximal load, they will exhibit the same under maximal velocity.  When squatting, I see a number of athletes who concentrate on pushing their knees externally or laterally.  In order to make this move, it forces them to roll out to the outside of their feet.  This causes movement issues when running at velocity…among others.  I’ve only listed an example but there are many other compensations or movement patterns that are caused by strength training. There can be a number of factors but I usually see a correlation with muscle efficiency, and velocity of movement.  Maybe in another post, I can explain that there really may not be much of a difference between velocity and absolute strength….at least when it comes to a muscle or group of muscles.

I was watching a track meet a couple of weeks ago nervously awaiting my son’s race. I watched the 3 other relay team members vigorously stretch their hamstrings, quadriceps preparing for the race. Fortunately, my son has actually listened to me…which doesn’t occur every day. Rather than stretching and putting stress on the muscles, he was moving and challenging his muscles at their end range…not beyond it. I know we have been brain washed about stretching and I’m sure there are all kinds of people who believe they were helped with stretching. The whole problem I have with a muscle being elastic is how could an elastic structure contract and hold such large forces? Ever try to tighten a stretch band? How does a muscle turn rock hard if it is elastic? Do elastic structures within the muscle suddenly turn off and rigid fibers take over? How could rigid fibers work with elastic fibers…seems like an oxymoron.

Latest research shows that muscles are like a sliding filaments. They contract at certain points based on neural impusles and feeback. The contraction almost can be described  almost similiar to a velcro attachment. The better the contraction, the more velcro surface area is attached. I’m simplifying what actually takes place…but when we stretch a muscle…what is actually moving? We are probably stretching ligament and tendons and “velcro” attachments. When we stretch a muscle…we are introducing stress to the body and temporarily making muscles weaker or another way of stating it…decreasing the ability of the muscle to responde to a stimulus.  So when we stretch a muscle beyond its normal end range, we are making it temporarily weaker.  One study recently indicated that a muscle that has been stretched can remain inhibited for up to one hour!  This opens the door for a potential injury!

So what should an athlete do before starting activity?  Move your joints to end ranges.  Use dynamic movements rather than static stretches.  Just remember, if you are trying to stretch a tight muscle, the tight muscle is trying to tell you something.  Tight muscles are protective mechanism in order to save the joint.  If you always feel tightness in your muscles, there are muscles elsewhere in the body that are inhibited and not sending and receiving information to your nervous system.  Visiting a MAT specialist could keep you from injury and perhaps just as importantly, help improve your athletic performance!