Redskins investigate rash of hamstring injuries

Can you give us some details?

I have to find the notes but i know it was a combo between circuit training/HIT training, he had 15-20 diff drills and the players were timed to see how long it took them to complete the workout. It was your typical HIT program lots of machines, no squats and higher reps, I also believe he had some strongman type training also. I try and my best and find the notes I had.

I don’t understand how a billion dollar franchise has assistant strength coaches with minimal to moderate experience. the buddy system? when you think about it, it would probably be a lot more cost effective to have people who really know their shit even if you have to pay them all 100k+.

Thats the shit that pisses me off, they always hired there buddies or there friends bubbies

Greetings, I’ve been away from the board for quite a while. I am absolutely perplexed with respect to how underqualified many ‘professionals’ are who coach at the highest levels of sport; team sports in particular.

The only rationalization that I have come up with, specifically in regards to team sports, is that the attainment of high sport results is only partially dependent upon the ‘physical’ component of preparation. The tactical and technical components are monumentally important and, therefore, compensate greatly for those athletes who are more skilled in these regards then in their ‘physical’ preparation.

I won’t address the psychological aspect at this time because the team disciplines clearly allow for a great deal of lattitude in this department.

Of course all regimes of preparation are to some degree interrelated and mutually dependent; however, it is fact that many team sport athletes are simply more tactically and technically skilled then they are physically developed.

On the contrary, disciplines such as track and field, while requiring an enormous tactical and technical efficiency of their own, simply won’t allow high results to be attained without the athlete already possessing a high level of physical preparedness.

It is my theory that the ‘strength & conditionig coach’ (a term that I no longer use to describe myself incidentally) is a redundant sequence of words that, unfortunately, all too often professionally titles an individual who is grossly unfit to do their work. Fortunate for most S&C coaches is:

  1. most athletes are grossly untrained with respect to their physical preparation and, therefore, respond positively to nearly any training stimulus. As a result, the development positively transfers to sport.
  2. the athletes are already gifted enough athletically to compensate for the coaching practice; as grossly inadequate as it might be.

What is my point, the S&C industry, much like the popular music industry, is a very forgiving one- in that, while connections/associations are vital, you certainly don’t need to be talented to achieve high status.

So what James is trying to say is that Brittany Speers could train the Washington Redskins!:smiley:

And the reaction she would have when another hammy blew: “Oops, I did it again!”

I’m sure thats all she wouldnt be training.:slight_smile:

So you have to talk the talk, and not walk the walk to get a job…

getting back on topic…

i have injured my hamstring at least once all 3 years in university. hurt it once in high school (senior yr).

the strength isnt an issue. i can RDL a boat load, and i have been on a leg curl machine once or twice and could do the entire rack easily for sets of 6.

flexibility not an issue either dynamically or statically–im quite flexible


this could be a running technique issue, i run with low hips sometimes, and have a tendency to overstride when pressing.

when i hurt my hamstring in university, the trainers tell me to do either:
-stim
-ultrasound
-graston
-combo of stim/ultrasound
-ive gotten art once by the trainers (ive done it a bunch at home with therapists)

they also make me do exercises right after the given therapy methods. stuff like hip extension (pushing leg back) band exercises, med ball kick flips (in leg curl motion) and stool crawls (sit in stool and reach and pull with legs)


what is wrong with this protocol?
is this the reason i re-injure myself?
(our warm up is pretty solid.)

Some may say lack of glute work in your program. Theory (synergist dominance) has it that if your glutes don’t work properly, hammies take up the slack during hip extension, and eventually pull during high workloads.

Take a look at your posture. Look up some of Eric Cressey and Mike Robertson’s stuff on t-nation and through google.

I had hamstring problems for a while and ART combined with correcting my anterior pelvis tilt worked wonders. I really think people either just don’t know or don’t believe the value of proper posture.

Brings up a question: Is the posture fixed by the ART loosening the hams or is it the other way round?
I treated an NFL player “diagnosed” by the team medical staff as finished, suggesting there was tendon involvement, after 8 (!) ham pulls.
When he arrived in Toronto, we reviewed his MRIs.
He’d had only ONE ham pull two years before and suffered a series of extension strains because no manual therapy had been done. Despite the claims by the team, the injury was in the middle of the ham belly, away from the tendon, making their assertion impossible.
After one week of therapy, including ART, and technical correction on his running technique, he was fine and ended up faster than ever before and, with follow up, NEVER had another ham strain for the rest of his career.

I agree that S and C can be the problem, but I’ve found that the worst issues happen in the training rooms, where there is this constant theme that, somehow the ham injury was the result of weakness, rather than overload, and that it must be cured. I was at a team with a good S and C program and was working on a linebacker (with legs built like the proverbial brick shit house!), minutes before his return to the line-up, and the Doctor was quizzing me: “But what do you intend to do about re-training and strengthening the muscle??”
I finally lost it and said: “Well, how the hell did he get weak? He just got hurt last week! Hell, can we now not give the athletes the weekends off without re-training them?”
I have to say I enjoyed watching the guy go out and play a crushing game, hitting one guy on the sidelines from out of nowhere and getting a safety, blowing the guy right through the end zone.

This is very true.

I love these ‘new’ experts coming out of the wood work with 15 tests to identify a weakness or imbalance.
To listen to them it’s a wonder the guy could walk before the ham injury.

You don’t need a range of tests to see that a guy needs therapy and in many cases even general therapy - once it’s good and effective therapy is very very helpful.

If a team has had 10 hamstring injuries it’s the coaches that need to be fixed not the hamstring.

Sounds like a Charlie one-liner! :smiley:

Hard to say the injuries because a squad of that size, involved in a sport where injury can come from contact-forced overstretching as well as running, might reasonably have 10 MINOR ham issues. Let’s say half could and should be resolved in the week between games, leaving 5 leading to at least one missed game.
Think of a sprint squad with 20 members and two have a minor injury that shows up- not too bad, you’d say.
It’s the DURATION of the injuries that is the first question that must be dealt with, meaning the medical staff. Minor stuff hangs around far too long!!
The excuses coming out of there are amazing too, such as the example I gave earlier. How can you claim that there’s tendon involvement in an injury to the middle of a muscle, proven on an MRI?? Does tendon run from end to end??

So, is an anteror pelvic tilt fixable through ART in the hamstrings? ( i ve strained my right ham 3 times!). I have a slightly protruding belly despite being lean, and i guess this is because of my slightly increased swayback and. And no amount of ab work fixes it. I have loose hip flexors as well as flexible quads and hamstrings too

I am determined to make a careful comeback, and i agree with Charlie 100%. The no1 reason for ham strains is poor planning of the “training load”.!!

:confused:

Here’s another consideration regarding what might be contributing factors to a hamstring injury in particular:

warm up

Many, many collegiate and NFL teams, and I state this because I’ve seen this many times, perform only static stretches prior to moving into highly dynamic individual and team pre-game drills, let alone the game itself.

If this is any indication as to what occurs prior to practices, which it is because I also have knowledge in this regard, then it is no wonder why a hamstring injury/strain in particular is almost imminent.

Furthermore, even if an adequate warm up is performed, how many of the athletes are going through the motions vs performing the drills as they are intended to be performed (through full amplitudes of movement and so forth). Again, this is an issue that I have witnessed.

So physical preparation and athletic training aside- how often are the athletes even sufficiently prepared/warmed up to simply tolerate the load presented by non-specific and specific training, and contests.

The answer- not many; which brings up a whole different category of questions in regards to why aren’t there even more non-contact related injuries.

Perhaps the discussion should flop in the direction of: Interesting how there are so few hamstring injuries considering the inconsistencies in warm ups and the amount of underqualified conditioning coaches and athletic trainers.

10 minutes of ab training 4 or so times a week has a lot of trouble correcting the hours upon hours you are sitting down and walking with that anterior pelvic tilt.

best way to improve your posture is to constantly reinforce it, stand in a straight line, ankles, hips, shoulders, ears should all be in a straight line. Go read Cressey and Robertson’s stuff, Neanderthal No More is a great start over on t-nation.