If you play a sport or care about any type of performance that involves your legs at all, you’ll want to keep these babies nice and strong. I’m talking about the hamstrings! Seems like a lot of people train them for no reason other than they know they should. But that’s no fun is it? Keep reading if you want to feel good and train hamstrings with a purpose from here on out.
Yikes, knee pain. If you enjoy walking pain-free then listen up because the hamstrings play a very important role in helping you avoid that. What’s one of the causes of knee pain? Well, it happens when the bottom of your leg (tibia) moves too far away from your upper leg (femur ):
And one of the things that keeps that from happening is a ligament called the Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL), but that ligament is fragile and can be prone to damage. So what can we do to help the ACL do its job of keeping your knee stable?
You guessed it, training the hamstrings! You see how the hamstring connect from your upper leg to your lower leg? It pulls your lower leg back so that it doesn’t move too far forward during strenuous activity. For example, imagine what your lower leg is doing when you land from a jump. It goes forward right?
Now, if that landing is forceful enough, you might tear your ACL. BUT, if your hamstrings are strong enough, they’ll keep that lower leg stable and make it that much more likely for that ACL to stay safe and intact thus ensuring that you remain with healthy knees.
But is the answer simply to train the hamstrings? Not exactly because even though you’re doing the exercises to strengthen them, you may be doing the WRONG ones while at the same time not fully training the hamstrings. Luckily for you though, you get to learn more about that in my Muscle Masterclass: Hamstrings. Watch my video below because this is gonna be a good one!
