In my last post, I spoke of lunging and the stress on the knee joint.  Today, I thought I would speak about muscle strains.  Keep in mind you strain muscles and sprain ligaments.  The most common muscle strains I see are hamstring, quadriceps and groin injuries.

They typically occur with a deceleration movement in sport or recreational activity.  In my experience, I notice that some athletes tend to be more prone to these than others.  This particular group of athletes seems to be those with a predominance of fast twitch fibers (more of your sprinters) and those lacking good flexibility and mobility (no surprise there).

Proper warm-up, strengthening, plyometrics and acceleration/deceleration training all play a role in preventing these injuries.  Recovering from such an injury is often a tricky thing.  Athletes often are fearful of pushing the injured tissue 100% (they fear re-injury) and coaches may not sufficiently gauge how long to hold the athlete out of full participation.  More importantly, the athlete often under reports the pain associated with the injury.  I have included a great recovery article HERE that gives you 3 R’s to go by. 

I also included a picture of one of my favorite rehab exercises for rehabbing high hamstring strains below.  It is the single leg Romanian dead lift and provides n excellent way to elongate the hamstrings functionally.  Pain or the absence thereof during full range of motion will indicate the relative healing of the injured tissue to date.  One should be able to do this equal to the non involved side without pain.

RDL - Descent

RDL - Descent