How does bending of the ankle affect hamstring stretching?

Question

How does bending of the ankle affect hamstring stretching? ￼

Dr. Mitchell Tanner, PT, DPT, CSCS · Answer

How does bending of the ankle affect hamstring stretching? This is a great question and the short answer to it is that changing ankle position does not affect the stretching of your hamstrings at all. But bending the ankle and changing ankle position like elevating the toes for example might feel like you are stretching the hamstrings more. But what's actually happening is you are stretching the calves which cross over the back of the knee and can feel like the hamstrings sometimes. But whenever you lift the toes up you are getting a bigger hamstring stretch. But if you are feeling a greater hamstring stretch with the toes up it's either calves or the nerves that run all the way down your back to the heel. So you are stretching those nerves but you are not actually changing the position of the hamstrings or how much length change you are getting from the hamstrings by moving the ankle. So it might feel like you are getting a bigger stretch when you lift the toes but it is probably not. On the inverse side of that if you elevate the heel and have your toes a little bit pointed this actually could give you a better hamstring stretch if you are limited in your ability to stretch your hamstrings by ankle mobility. So if your ankles are really tight and you feel a stretch in your calves when you are trying to stretch your hamstrings maybe lifting the heel could be better but ultimately the hamstrings do not cross the ankle joint. So any change in ankle position is mostly going to affect how much tension you have on the calf and the nerves that run from your back down to the bottom of your ankle.

Nick Hadinger · Answer

So bending the ankle really shouldn't affect hamstring stretching too much.  You know, you can argue that if you Dorisflex  that the ankle or pull your toes up towards you that it's going to rotate the tibia a bit and that might affect some of the length or tension on the hamstring, but really if you're feeling a bigger stretch when you pull your toes up towards you, then you're likely just feeling nerve tension and so that's a really common thing and it's not necessarily bad unless you're feeling that nerve tension all the time, or it's causing kind of chronic hamstring tightness, in which case we wanna probably look at the back or in and around the hip to see if we can  kind of resolve that.

Robert Eckles · Answer

Good day. The reason that the position of the ankle matters when you're doing hamstring stretching is that the muscles of the calf cross the knee from distal to proximal. The hamstrings cross the knee from proximal to distal. So if you are stretching the hamstrings and your ankle is dorsiflexed, meaning your calf muscles are tight, you're actually working against two different muscle groups, both of which are very, very powerful. So hamstring stretching should first be done with the foot in a plantarflexed position so that the calf muscles are relatively relaxed. This will allow you to focus more effectively on stretching the hamstrings by themselves. I hope that helps.

Jim Heafner · Answer

Well I love this question because this really gets into how connected the body is. So on one hand ankle motion does not have to impact the hamstring at all but if you're in a hamstring type stretch position and your foot is pulled up because of neurologically and fascially how the connection there all the way up to the back of the leg into the hamstrings and how the hamstrings intertwine with the calf muscles when the leg is straight you're gonna see the connected tension as I pull the foot up all the way through the backside of the hamstring and then at the same time being able to sit up tall here is also going to influence that stretch. So when we think about hamstring mobility we've got to think about how tall the pelvis is or how tall the pelvis and low back are and the position of the foot and ankle knowing that you can offload the stretch by letting your foot and ankle drop down and you can increase the stretch by pulling your foot and ankle up.

melissa minniti · Answer

So bending our ankle can have an effect on what our hamstring stretch is going to feel like, since some of these muscles and nerves are connected across the back of our leg. So in terms of the ankle, if we were to bend our toes towards our face, so going into what we call ankle dorsiflexion, so bending our ankle backwards, this is going to put more of a stretch during our hamstring stretch, because that gastrocnemius, our calf muscle essentially, does connect to the back of our knee, around the area where our hamstring tendons connect to the back of the knee. And so it's going to put a lot of these areas all on stretch, so it's going to intensify the stretch if we bring our ankle into that bent position. If we bend our ankle the other way, so pointing our toes away from our face, it's going to decrease the stretch that we're experiencing, because it puts those muscles in the back of the leg in a bit of a more slacked position. So it can change how we're experiencing that stretch. It can also impact how we are stretching the nerve. So we have our sciatic nerve that goes from our buttock region down the back of our leg, and down the back of parts of our lower leg when it branches off. And so if we have, again, that ankle bent into more of that dorsiflexion position, it's going to put that nerve more on stretch if we point it less so. So that can impact things as well. So essentially bending our ankle does have an impact on how we're experiencing a hamstring stretch, and we can play with the positioning depending on what our goals are for that stretch.

Dr. Brian Cunningham · Answer

How does bending the ankle affect the hamstring stretches? Well, when you pull up on your ankle, your hamstrings attach behind your knees so you're pulling that whole kinetic chain of soft tissue from your butt all the way down to your foot. It also intensifies the stretch. Sometimes you have to be careful not to lock out your knee because when people tend to stretch their hamstrings, they tend to bend forward and that can put a stretch on your nervous tissue or your neural tissue. So you have to be careful. What I would advise you to do is put a soft bend on your knee, still pull your foot up, but then engage the muscle when you're stretching in the side to side or rotational plane and just go to the point that you feel a gentle stretch. Hopefully that helps.

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"How does bending of the ankle affect hamstring stretching? "

"How does bending of the ankle affect hamstring stretching? ￼"

"How does bending of the ankle affect hamstring stretching? "