PDA

View Full Version : Hamstring Injury and Recovery Article



BigAnt
03-14-13, 1:11 am
Do not “HAM” it up…
By Anthony (Big Ant) DeAngelis
March 14, 2013

As I said many times before, an injury is a bodybuilder’s worst nightmare! You cannot train with a hundred percent intensity, use maximum weights, and incorporate you favorite “go to” exercises to add that precious lean muscle we all crave. Mentally this can hurt you. Physically it can destroy your physique. Please do not confuse the previously few lines that one cannot build a powerful physique, win bodybuilding shows and exceed your fitness goals training with lighter weights and using only a handful of exercises to choose from. I AM LIVING PROOF TO THAT. That subject will be saved for a future article. However, we need to over come and heal the injured body part(s) to train successfully! However, you can still train around an injury, not through it! One, another, or we all at one time will be injured. As we age, it is more possible to be injured. We have lesser mineral salts in the bones to keep them hard, our tendons and ligaments get weaker and more fragile from the many years of pounding them with heavy weights. In addition, the joints become weaker with age and with repetitive use. Some injuries are more serious than others are. A partial and full thickness muscle tear is a lot more serious than a sprain, strain and a pulled muscle. In addition, the reason more bodybuilders and people in the fitness-sports field have more muscle injuries than bone injuries is because we do workout with weights. The healthy stress we give and place on our bones strengthens them. The same reason why so many health care practitioners recommend when people get older, after the age of fifty they incorporate some kind of weight training protocol for bone strength. To protect against osteoporosis. Again not the throwing around heavy weights that Ronnie Coleman and Branch Warren are seen to do in their training videos. However, a nice easy upper and lower body circuit weight-training program two to three times a week will suffice. Moreover, bodybuilders/weight lifters have more muscle that surrounds the bone, which also helps protect the bone from any trauma. The same reason when you read about, or hear when bodybuilders are in severe car crashes, or work accidents and they have muscle tears but their bones remain safe and unharmed.

I had a hamstring injury a little over three weeks ago. It was a minor injury, a pulled muscle. Nevertheless, if I had not taken proper care of it, it could have turned into a partial or full thickness tear. Yeah we all know that we have to rest an injury. Actually, the body’s first stage in injury healing is inflammation. Our body releases histamine, this allows the capillaries to become leaky (vasodilatation) increases permeability. Which allow the white blood cells to do their job to start cleaning the area out. If you tear a muscle, you might see some bruising, a black-blue-purple coloring around the torn area. An example of a pectoral muscle tear can bruise into your biceps. Because of the torn muscle fibers, the blood vessels in the torn fibers will leak blood into surrounding tissues, the biceps. This is our body’s way of telling us to rest, back off the weight training.
Now for the first thirty-six hours of an injury, you should ice the area. I used a frozen bag of corn. This molds to almost any injury site nicely. I iced it for fifteen minutes, four time’s day. This will reduce some of the surface swelling and give us a little bit of pain free movement in the injured area. Also, please try to keep the injured body part elevated when icing, this will further help reduce swelling.

It seems as we injure ourselves when we are either not properly warmed up, training with a much heavier weight than our body is accustomed to and near the end of a working set, trying to complete those final struggling repetitions. I injured my hamstring on my last exercise, walking dumbbell lunges. I did warm up properly on the treadmill for my lower body and core body with a ten-minute walk. I also did some light stretching between my sets of quadriceps and hamstring exercises. I was on my last set of lunges, the final few steps I had remaining. Than I felt a “pop” in my right hamstring. I replaced the weights, drove home, elevated my right leg and began the ice treatments. I took off from all weight exercises that involved my hamstring muscle for seven days. No quadriceps training because, when training that muscle the hamstrings are the secondary mover, they are involved. I also had to limit my back exercises. No dead lifts, t-bar, barbell or low pulley rows. These exercises also turn on the hamstring muscle and some even put the hamstring muscle in an extension pre stretch position. I could do some seated pull downs, pull over machine and machine row exercises with my chest supported on the chest pad. Calf training was also limited to training with very light weights in a “pain free’ zone. I also was careful training my remaining upper body muscles, the arms, chest, shoulders and abdominals muscles. Just making sure the hamstring muscles where turned off and not involved in the above muscle groups. In my time off from training lower body, I did some cardiovascular work in a pain free zone. I found out the recumbent bike worked best for me. This also helps with endorphin release. The body’s natural way of increasing your threshold of pain and making you feel better. When I did return to lower body training, I started back with very light weights and higher repetitions. The repetitions now that I used where between fifteen and twenty-five. This forced more fresh blood and oxygen into the area for healing. I tried the same exercises that I normally include in my lower body training protocol, leg extensions, squats, leg press, seated and lying leg curl, stiff leg dead lifts and walking lunges. If any of these exercises caused me pain or did not feel right, I immediately terminated the movement. Luckily, all of the previous exercises felt fine for me. I also incorporate some pain free stretching in between my lower body exercises as well as still icing the hamstring after each workout for twenty minutes.

Now it is almost one month later and my right hamstring is almost back to one hundred percent. I did train legs the other day and incorporated all of my staple lower body exercises. I still did somewhat higher reps on the leg press, twenty reps that felt very good to me. Nevertheless, the other exercises I used did not cause me any pain!


Remember to warm up properly, and if you get an unnatural feeling in the middle of a set or repetition discontinue that set or repetition immediately, go home to ice, and elevate that body part. Your muscles will not atrophy by missing several day of training to recover from an injury. However, if you are stubborn and try to train though a minor injury, that can lead to a major injury. Training through pain and skipping recovery will not get you to your fitness goals faster. You MIGHT do it in the short-term, but it will come back to haunt you in the form of continued injuries, arthritis, chronic pain and more. In addition, we do not want that. Train smart!