Can Massage Therapy Help Hamstring Pain Near Cambridge, MA
July 18, 2024

Question: Do you think a similar pain in the back of the thigh while running can be attributed to a hamstring injury or a lower back injury? True or False?
Answer: True
Hamstring Anatomy
You have three hamstring muscles in the back of your thigh. Every muscle has a tendon that attaches it to a bone. Tendons are strong cords at the ends of every muscle. Where a tendon attaches a muscle to a bone, is usually the most vulnerable area for an injury to occur. The hamstrings are attached to your lower leg just below the knee in three different places, each with its own tendon. The other attachment is at the back of the lower hip at the bone you sit on (the ischial tuberosity). At this end of the muscle, all three tendons join and become one common tendon for all the hamstrings.
Your hamstrings, which have two major functions, play a crucial role in your knee and hip movement: they bend (or flex) your knee and lift your leg to the back (which is called extension). Without your hamstrings, you could not walk. The expression being hamstrung literally means being powerless or useless.
The Causes of Hamstring Pain
You can strain your hamstring in three different places: near the back of your knee in one of the tendons, in the muscle at the back of your thigh, or where it attaches to the bone you sit on. Most hamstring injuries cause pain in the muscle at the back of the thigh or where the common tendon attaches to the bone at the bottom of your hip, sometimes called the sit bone.
A lower back injury can create a similar pain through the mechanism of referred pain. This means that the injury is in one place, and the pain is in another place. Many of the muscles, nerves, and ligaments in the lower back and buttocks can cause pain in the hamstring area.
Ligaments are like strong cords; they hold your bones together. They have very little blood supply and cause much of the pain that occurs in the lower back. Many of these ligaments and muscles can cause a referred pain down the back of the thigh, so testing out whether it’s the hamstring that’s strained and causing the pain at the back of your thigh or the lower back muscles or ligaments that are causing a referred pain to the back thigh is a crucial task if you are going to have effective treatment.
Can Massage Therapy Help Hamstring Pain
A skilled therapist can perform a few simple hands-on tests to determine whether the pain is coming from the hamstring or the lower back. Sometimes, this differentiation is easy, and sometimes, it’s complex, especially if you have both problems simultaneously.
Once the real problem is identified, effective treatment can begin. Several different approaches can be effective, but no treatment works if you don’t first identify exactly what the problem is.
For example, if the hamstring is injured, you must know the anatomy well enough to put your finger on the exact spot of the correct hamstring. If it’s the lower back, many different places can cause referred pain in the thigh. The therapist must be able to identify and treat the right areas where the adhesive scarring is located.
The final step in the treatment process is introducing exercises that rebuild the strength and flexibility of the hamstring muscles. This must be a gradual process to avoid re-injury. If the hamstring muscle has been injured for more than a month, that hamstring will have lost a lot of strength.
Whatever treatment you receive, whether for a hamstring or lower back injury, for you to be fully recovered and be pain-free, all of the adhesive scar tissue must be resolved, and strength and flexibility must be restored.
If you are experiencing hamstring pain and live in the Boston area, schedule a complimentary 10-15 minute phone consultation.
Call for a Free 10-15 minute Phone Consultation →
Ben E. Benjamin holds a Ph.D. in Sports Medicine and was the founder and President of the Muscular Therapy Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the author of dozens of articles on working with injuries and chronic pain as well as the widely used books in the field, Are You Tense?, Exercise Without Injury and Listen To Your Pain: The Active Person’s Guide to Understanding, Identifying and Treating Pain and Injury. Dr. Benjamin has been in private practice for over 50 years and teaches therapists throughout the country.
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