Hamstring "tweaks"

Tweaked a hammy again tonight at rugby and its becoming pretty frustrating.

Have been out of it for several years and gained weight from 225-275 over 5 years or so. Spent the last 1-2 years doing barbell training starting with SS over to BBM. Have only managed to drop 15lbs and 2in on waist but that’s a different topic.

I haven’t full on messed up a hamstring for almost 10 years, but seem to pull one every other time I go out to rugby training the past 2 months trying to get back into it. Generally feels pretty close to normal after a few days until I try rugby again.

Have been able to continue squatting have kind of been shirking my pulls to keep sessions short due to recent time constraints for training.

Haven’t gotten far with nordic curls because I started around when I started tweaking them and have been afraid to do them too soon after the tweaks and worrying about doing them while unadapted to them and trying to sprint the next day at rugby.

I believe my lack of exposure to eccentric and/or high velocity eccentric contractions is the culprit.

Any way to modify the nordics to work up to doing full rom/full load nordics?

Anything else I need to look into to get back into the quick acceleration, change of direction and sprinting needed to play again?

Just have become frustrated by the early and often tweaks that are preventing me from ramping up at rugby training.

So my favorite analogy for these situations will work very well for rugby players. You can think of high speed training (re: sprinting at rugby) like drinking. I highly doubt you would want to go out and try and go round for round with yourself from your younger rugby days. If we did that now, we’d all accept that we would be hungover as well the next day. Well, stress is stress. If we haven’t sprinted much for a while it is not uncommon to go out and suffer a strain.

The go to exercise for this is the Nordic but if this is an acute injury you may not be ready for that quite yet. If you have access to a hamstring curl machine, starting light there with a focus on eccentrics is a good place to start. You can also start by working on single leg bridges. That is pretty low level but the ultimate thing is finding out where to start after you have experienced and injury. Once you get past that phase, I would HIGHLY recommend Nordics as your bread and butter for the next 6-10 weeks.

Otherwise, think of it like drinking, don’t start your training off with a keg stand. You can start getting out and running some light drills, they are the equivalent of light domestic American beer, hardly any harm and you can do it for a while. Then start working your way into more high intensity training. The bigger problem is we almost all go out night one, start with a scrimmage, and try and act like were were when we were playing 5-10 years ago.

Much appreciated. Does feel like the body knows what it wants to do but can’t hang.

Just saw the clinical athlete podcast did an episode on Nordics and hamstring injury, lol. Gotta love timeliness.