Too Much Pain, No Gain: Avoid... Video Transcript

Webcast Transcript

It's a major muscle group that helps flex the knee, or bring your heel to you butt, and it also stabilizes some of the low back and is involved in running, walking, skating, inline skating. What happens to a lot of different athletes, recreational athletes and professional athletes alike is, that muscle becomes very strong and acts as a stabilizer, and at the same time becomes very inflexible. The individual hasn't warmed up properly or doesn't have a proper flexibility program that they've done to work on that muscle. What can happen is you get a strain. You get a pull in the muscle. The damage is either to the tendonous part of the muscle or the muscle itself and it is a very difficult muscle in terms of the length of time that it takes to heal. Professional athletes, football players, basketball players, they're loading up that muscle with such a high level of impact when they're up and jumping up for a rebound and coming back down, or a lineman jumping off the line to block another player. That muscle becomes so loaded and then has to explode. That's where they run into problems if the muscle is weakened by overuse injuries, or again, by an acute injury where it just strains itself because of inflexibility or not enough strength.

DAVID FOLK THOMAS: Jonathan, anything to add to that?

JONATHAN GLASHOW, MD: I think it's a unique muscle. It's very long. It has a unique sort of anatomy to it. Again, it's part of the core muscle group and it's used in almost any lower extremity exercise from skating to running. So it's overused, it's frequently tight, it's hooked into the low back so people with low back problems also have hamstring problems. It's very true, it's frequently injured, hard to get better, but you need it do any thing in sports.

DAVID FOLK THOMAS: But just remember for you folks out there unless you're a professional athlete, you still have to show up for work with your hamstring injury. Guys, thanks a lot for joining us on the webcast talking about injury prevention. So get out to the gym, go out to the tennis courts, the basketball courts, listen to what these guys just told you. Do things the right way and you'll avoid those injuries that may put you on the disabled list. Thanks for joining our webcast. I'm David Folk Thomas. We'll see you next time.

Related Videos

Can Drinking Too Much Water Sink Runners?