My name is Julia Tang and I’m a Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) and Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS). I love working with athletes and active individuals of all ages, helping them improve their daily functional activities as well as sports performance.
It is advised that you consult with an appropriate medical professional prior to starting any new workout or fitness routine.
This video is meant to provide an example for a circuit of exercises targeting the hamstring muscle as well as the proximal tendon, which is the hamstring tendon up higher in your thigh, attaching at your sitbone. If you have pain with prolonged sitting, accelerating, sprinting, hip hinge-dominant movements such as RDLs or good mornings, and activities that cause compression of the tendon around the sitbone such as split squats, high step ups, or lunge variations, you may have proximal hamstring tendinopathy. The goals of rehab for hamstring tendinopathy include to improve the overall capacity, strength, and resilience of the proximal hamstring muscle-tendon unit, and to do that we need to give the hamstring and tendon progressive overload. The use of tempo exercises is usually less irritating, especially for the eccentric component, which is why we incorporate that into the RDLs and SL RDLs here, which will likely be the most irritating exercises.
For tendinopathies, we use something called 24-hour pain monitoring to determine if you're exercising at the right intensity. On a 0-10 pain scale, with 0 being no pain, 5 means you want to stop whatever your'e doing, and 10 being the worst pain imaginable, go to the ER and cut it off, we want to induce about 3-4/10 pain during exercises targeting the hamstring tendon, since this means we are pushing the muscle and tendon unit hard enough to induce a change with progressive overload. If there's no pain at all, we're probably not pushing quite hard enough to create a change. However, if the pain is getting up to a 5-6/10 during the exercises, lasts overnight and into the next day, and if the symptoms are getting worse week to week, that's a sign we pushed it too hard and need to back off a bit. A hamstring circuit like this should be done 2-3x/week to address tendinopathy, not on two consecutive days, to allow some time for the muscle and tendon to recover and build up some resiliency and strength.
If you are recovering from a hamstring muscle strain, this circuit could work for you too! You don't need to do the 3-1 tempo for the RDLs and SL RDLs, just do a smooth, steady pace on the way up and down. If your hamstring is very irritable, you can slow down the tempo in both directions, more like a 2-2 tempo. For the SL elevated bridges, bend your knee more, up to 90 deg, to get more hamstring muscle fatigue. If you are recovering from a hamstring muscle strain, you should also be incorporating jogging and running at gradually increasing your speeds, while you increase your strength with exercises such as these. More on hamstring strains here: [ Ссылка ]
Anyway, if you've read this far, great work! Here's my recommended sets/reps/frequency for this hamstring circuit. Hope this helps!
2-3x/week, allowing 1-2 rest days between sessions
2-4 rounds of:
Tempo RDLs with weight, 3 down, 1 up, x8-12 reps
SL elevated bridges (knee bent for more hamstring load), x10-15 reps each leg
Tempo SL RDLs with weight, 3 down, 1 up, x8-12 reps each leg
Glute bridge walkouts, x6-10 reps
