“Don’t ‘chill and stretch’ that, you have to ‘heat and squeeze’ it instead.”
(This means don’t ice and stretch a muscle pull; heat it and compress it, then move it around instead. Even more important)
I’ve had to offer that advice three times in the last month to new athletes. It has me thinking about how injury develops, about risk factors, and, naturally, about how to structure early days of training to avoid needing that advice at all.
Three New Masters Athletes With Hamstring Injuries
About a month ago, on the last day of a strong 5 weeks of training with an athlete new to sprinting, said athlete felt a hamstring tug during a jump drill called “Big Split Bounce”.
A week or so after that, in our second practice together, another athlete new to sprinting but in fair overall condition, pulled up during the first flat submax sprint after several hill sprint reps.
And just a few days ago, a working parent joining their young child for warmup drills had the limp characteristic of a pull as they walked back from a rep.
Hamstring pulls are no joke. They can happen to any athlete – and they are much, much more likely in sprinting than in any other context. It’s right to ask why that is!
First Risk: Your Desk Is Out To Get You
The first reason the risk of hamstring pull is so high with sprinting is that desk jobs are breaking us. All of us. For much of every day, between working at the desk and commuting to the desk, to say nothing of sitting on the couch relaxing after leaving the desk, we ask our glutes to go to sleep with our hamstrings and hip flexors slightly contracted yet under no load.
(Wait, what does any of that mean? The chair I’m sitting in supports my butt and very little weight is on my feet at the same time my knees are bent and I am flexed at the hip. So big, powerful muscles that would normally hold my pelvis in place are all asleep every moment I sit in an “ergonomic” seat.)
So desk jobs are making our most valuable pelvic-control muscles weak and tight. Sprinting requires and demands that those very same muscles move at their fastest possible contraction rates, reaching their highest possible contraction forces. Sprinting is fully anti-desk in every way. Consider how much time you have to sit in a workday compared to how much time you could spend sprinting – this is hours compared to seconds.
No one can do enough sprinting to undo working at a desk. And most of us can only afford the luxury of being free to sprint by working at that desk. So the occupational hazard of our hobby is catastrophic hamstring injury. Of course there are ways to mitigate that hazard and I, for one, have to be diligent about prehab and recovery and mobility activities so I don’t pull up myself. But we have to start by acknowledging the real risk.
Second Risk: Your Body Is Out To Get You
The second reason the risk of hamstring pull is so high with sprinting is that you are in the worst conditions (1) when you are brand-new to intense training and (2) when you are approaching elite. Huh? You are at greatest risk when you first start training sprints, then very nearly the same risk when you have trained them for a long time.
In the near-elite case, it’s because you are so much more powerful and very close to your performance limits. Any deviation in pelvic position (because of fatigue or injury compensation, often) can tip you over that fine line, then the hamstring is your warning shot that you’re about to tear yourself apart. That’s a bummer, but elite athletes know the risks.
In the beginner case, it’s because your hamstring wiring is still built for power, even if none of the structures around it can handle that power. Glutes and hamstrings are fast and powerful by design.
But if your midsection is weak (abs & obliques, spinal erectors, hip flexors), your body can’t find or maintain any safe position for applying that power.
If your feet are weak or your calves deconditioned, your lower body is not stable on the ground when that power is applied.
If your upper body coordination is out of sync with your legs (like the cross-body arm swing common in amateur distance running), your pelvis is literally being sheared in the transverse plane with every step.
Any one of those is enough to pop a hammy. All three are typical of a sprinting novice, which means you nearly guarantee yourself an injury by just diving in.
Ironically, if we work out of sequence and teach you good coordination for sprinting before shoring up those weaknesses, your risk of a hamstring pop goes up with every week of successful training. This is where I went wrong.
How I Failed Those New Masters Athletes
This is the part where I realize those athletes getting hurt was partly my fault. I’m teaching people how to sprint with refined motor-learning drills at low speeds.
But the icing on our training cupcake is a fast rep or two each session. Meaning their brains and bodies were learning how to apply the power they had in appropriate sequence…yet the deficiencies remained. It matters very little how strong or weak you start in a general sense. It matters very little how slowly you are, in fact, running during your first sprinting sessions.
It matters a LOT whether your body is prepared for that new load. It isn’t the first step of a rep or the first rep of a session. It’s after just enough fatigue creeps in that you can barely, almost imperceptibly, lose the safe position when you already have momentum.
This all hit me like a slap in the face when that parent pulled up while their young child learned skipping, hopping, jumping, and running skills with our early drills.
For the child, this was the perfect menu for learning to sprint. But it was perfect because they play a half dozen sports, rip around the playground at recess every day, and would rather roll around on the floor than sit on a chair. This child has no intermuscular deficiencies. So skipping, hopping, jumping, and running doesn’t produce much fatigue, nor does the little fatigue they produce create much risk.
The parent joined their child for about a third of the prep drills. The parent probably hadn’t skipped or hopped or jumped in months – if not years. The parent was not actively playing another sprint, jump, throw sport, so probably had the weaknesses described above in addition to not having the coordination for sprinting locked in just yet. Fatigue came on quick and they were wise enough to take extra rest between drills.
Fatigue, however, doesn’t fade in seconds or minutes when you’re new to intense training. It fades in days. So when the parent joined a mini-hurdle run (at a kid appropriate distance, sure, but still beyond their preparation), too many things fell apart to maintain a safe position. Mini-hurdle drills demand that you sprint correctly, even at reduced speed. So I permitted that parent to get into sprinting positions, to demand of themselves sprinting coordination, even though the rest of their system wasn’t ready for the forces of sprinting.
I wasn’t watching the parent, of course. I was watching the child. But when I saw the parent limp back around, I suddenly understood all of it.
What New Masters Athletes Can Do To Avoid Hamstring Pulls
Even though I recently railed against “older, slower, and lower” in my Saturday Sprinting newsletter, when you’re getting started as an older athlete, you really do have to begin slower and lower.
New Masters athletes shouldn’t sprint. At least, not at first.
Pre-requisites to sprinting for Masters athletes:
- be able to hold a plank for 1 minute
- be able to hang from a bar for 30 seconds
- be able to squat deep for 5 reps.
In your first training sessions as a Masters athlete:
Spend more time on your prep than on your training. I mean your foam rolling and general mobility in the first several sessions. Then I mean those things plus your general warmup. After that I mean all those things in addition to your sprint prep drills.
It’s okay to have a 30-40 minute preparation for sprinting over your first month or two because, to quote Dan John, the warmup is the workout anyway. March, skip, and hop for much more time than you even think of running.
Then, when you do run, keep the reps short and modified – run up stairs, run up hills, run against resistance bands. Run for 2-3 seconds rather than 7+. And stop before you even notice you’re tired.
To quote Christopher Sommer, “make haste slowly.” It’s essential for the Masters athlete to be consistent first, then to do a reasonable volume of work consistently, and only then to do truly intense work!
How To Build Performance Safely As A Masters Athlete
The consistency at low volume and low intensity is how you address deficiencies which increase your injury risk.
The consistent volume at low or medium intensity is how you lock in your coordination before you add speed.
And those as your foundation allow you to train with consistent, moderate volume at high intensity, which is where performance comes from.
Rushing yourself to performance – or attempting any performance before the foundation is solid – compromises the most essential ability: availability. A hurt athlete can’t train optimally.
And I see now why, how, and with what I have to start new Masters sprinters even slower. As with accomplished athletes, I need to hold them back more significantly and more often, so their work capacity doesn’t outpace their recovery. I’ve been fortunate to never pull a hamstring, but I’ve overdone training and gotten hurt in a dozen other ways. What permitted high-speed injury in those new athletes is different in time but not type to my overuse injuries.
I know how to lead new Masters athletes into high-performance while managing this risk better now.
But until they are ready to get back on the track, “don’t ‘chill and stretch’ that, ‘heat and squeeze’ instead.” Like a pressure cooker, we need to build up slowly before the magic can happen.