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Knee to chest: Lie on your back. Grab one knee and pull it to your chest, rotating your hips as if you were going to look at your navel. Straighten the other leg, pointing your toes at the wall. | Grab toes: Roll slightly onto one side. Grab the toes of one leg and extend it, pulling the toes back. This gets the hamstrings, glutes, calf and the bottom of the foot. |
Hip and quad stretch:Grab your ankle and with the leg at 90 degrees, pull it behind you until you feel a good stretch in the front of the thigh. Then you should try to pull the ankle to your butt. The first motion stretches the front of the hip, the second additionally stretches the quads. The picture has the first phase as shown on the left, then the final phase shown on the right. |
Now, if you experienced hamstring cramping
you have a problem with your gluteus maximus. This could either be weakness or due to
misfiring. The latter can occur due to any number of reasons and is sometimes seen in healthy
athletes but you should fix it. A common cause for this is using a knee curl
machine, since this teaches the hamstring to do something it wasn't really designed to
do, flex the knee (it can do that, but was made to straighten the hip
from a bent position, as in a deadlift,
which you should consider doing.) A good way to retrain the glute is to get on all fours and raise
one knee until it won't go any further, hold it for 5 - 8 seconds, then repeat (pictured above).
You will look a lot
like a dog visiting a fire hydrant, I admit, but this is a great way to isolate the glutes
and can teach you to fire it properly. If you want, try laying a stick on
your back while you do this, either along the spine or at 90 degress to it. This
enforces good form and keeps you from cheating by tilting the body.
While hamstring cramping here is not some sort of emergency, you should probably get so you can fire the glute since otherwise you have a higher possibility of a hamstring pull.