The most common hamstring injury is when you pull and or strain a hamstring muscle, the hamstring is made up of 3 muscles that are at the back of your thigh that extend from your hip to below the knee. It is also possible with a hamstring injury that you have torn one of these muscles. A hamstring injury is quite common when playing sports that require a lot of running with stopping and starting movements. These sports include football, basketball, tennis and soccer.
Hamstring Injury Causes and Symptoms
You may have a hamstring injury if you experience one of the following:
- A sharp pain all of a sudden in your thigh/hamstring area
- A tearing sensation in your thigh while playing sports or during an activity
- If two hours has passed after playing a sport and you still feel sore and there is swelling in the hamstring area.
- You experience bruising along the back of your hamstring
- You can’t put weight on your hamstring muscles.
All these are common symptoms of a hamstring injury, if you have mild symptoms you can often treat them at home please see the Hamstring Injury home treatment section. However if have any of the symptoms below its best you see a doctor:
- Can’t put any weight on the leg
- Can’t walk very far
- Significant numbness in the hamstring area
- Have torn this hamstring before or any other major hamstring injury
Now often the doctor will advise you what you need to do, most of the time it will be easy treatments however there are some hamstring injuries that require surgery. The surgery is not considered a major one but it may be needed to fix your Hamstring Injury.
Home Treatment for a Hamstring Injury
When you have a hamstring Injury the main and best treatment for it is rest and time, normally mild hamstring injuries will heal in time. The best thing to do is ice it 2 to 3 times a day in order to relieve the swelling and if you are experiencing pain you can treat that with over the counter pain killers, they don’t need to be specific to your hamstring injury just regular pain killers.
When icing you hamstring injury remember not to directly apply the ice as that can cause ice burn, always put a hand towel in between your bare skin and the ice. After you have iced your hamstring its best practices to rub it in order to recirculate the blood in the hamstring in order for it to heal faster.
Exercises for Hamstring Injury
After you have suffered a Hamstring injury and you have rested and iced it for a period so that it is feeling better the next thing you will want is to do some Hamstring Exercise to strengthen your hamstrings and prevent another hamstring injury. The first type of exercises you will want to do is stretching, stretching will allow you to lengthen your hamstrings, which makes them a lot less likely to tear or pull because of their increased length.
After you have lengthened your hamstrings the next step is to make them stronger by adding weights into the equation, this will help strengthen them which will reduce the pressure on the hamstring muscles when using them in a sporting activity. Check out our post on Exercise for Hamstring Injury for videos on exercises and a detailed summary of the best stretches and exercises for your hamstring injury.
Further Hamstring Injury Prevention
After you have fully recovered from your hamstring injury and done the proper exercises to lengthen and strengthen your hamstring, you can start playing sports again even the activity that caused the original hamstring injury. The best thing to do before you engage in these activities is to warm up your hamstring, you can do this by doing the hamstring exercises mention above and starting small. By starting with small movements, for example don’t try to kick the ball as far as you can in your first kick, just warm up to those big kick by doing smaller ones. Check out or post on Hamstring Injury Prevention for more information so you don’t have to go through this horrible Hamstring Injury again.