A 2-Minute Yoga Routine To Protect Your Hamstrings
Hamstrings are often some of the tightest muscles in runners — which also make them especially prone to aches, pains, and even injury.
“Over-tightening of any muscle will pull the bone structure out of alignment,” yoga instructor and runner Matt Giordano tells Yahoo Health. “Tight hamstrings can result in pain or injury of the hamstrings themselves, or in the hips and low back.”
Plus, Giordano says, the hamstrings are integral to the postural alignment of the pelvis. Why this is important: “When the body is misaligned, certain muscles will over-strengthen and others will eventually become stretched out to the point where they no longer know how to engage properly,” he says. “This is important to note because it tells us that a simple tightness in the hamstrings, if not stretched, can lead to years of recovery of the rest of your body.”
Fortunately, yoga can help stretch the hamstrings by strengthening the internal rotators of the the hips, quads, and upper buttock muscles. “This approach helps your body develop strength against its own resistance, and it will help stretch parts of the muscles you wouldn’t normally stretch when just allowing gravity to passively pull you into a stretch,” Giordano says.
Watch the video above as Giordano takes you through a two-minute hamstring-stretching yoga sequence, part of Gaiam’s new “Athletic Yoga for Runners” DVD (available on Amazon).
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