Our articles are not designed to replace medical advice. If you have an injury we recommend seeing a qualified health professional. To book an appointment with Tom Goom (AKA ‘The Running Physio’) visit our clinic page. We offer both in-person assessments and online consultations.
There’s a school of thought that says the best way to train something is to practice the activity itself. Want to improve running? Then run!
Some people take this point to an extreme where they consider anything besides that target activity as ‘non-functional’ and, in some cases, even harmful to the main goal.
One area where opinion is often divided is in hamstring injury rehab. Despite a large body of evidence to support them, eccentric exercises like Nordic curls are dismissed by some as non-functional (largely because they don’t look much like running).
Sprinting is a common cause of hamstring injury but also a key goal activity so how good is sprinting itself as a rehab tool? Can it improve hamstring strength or address fascicle length (which is thought to be key for the hamstrings)?
We explore this and consider how to integrate sprinting within rehab in the video below.
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References:
Mendiguchia et al. (2020) – https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0228283
Freeman et al. (2019) – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31332988/
