Leg Exercise - Seated Hamstring Stretch 1

Commonly Used For: Knee pain and low back pain.

Video Transcription: This is a seated hamstring stretch. It is nice to perform if you are stuck in a sitting position for a long time, like a long car trip, or at the office. All you need is a chair, or a couch. What you are going to do is sit on the edge. You are going to extend the leg out in front of you that you want to stretch, sit up nice and tall, so that you are not slumping through your lower back. You want to be all the way up, nice neutral spine position, then — maintaining that position — you are going to slowly lean forward, until you feel a stretch in the back of your thigh. Hold that position for about thirty seconds to a minute and then you can back out of it. You want to make sure that when you are doing the stretch, you are not letting your knee bend. If you find that your knee does keep bending, you can use your hands to put gentle pressure above your knee cap on your thigh and help hold it in a straightened position. And that is your seated hamstring stretch.

Leg Exercise - Seated Hamstring Stretch 2

Commonly Used For: Knee pain and low back pain.

Video Transcription: This is a seated hamstring stretch, which you might perform if you have tight hamstrings, and this might be causing low back pain, knee pain. So what you're going to do is sit, you're going to extend the leg out in front of you that you want to stretch, the other leg can be bent, up. You want your foot pointing straight up towards the ceiling. You're going to sit up nice and tall. You want to make sure you're not slumping through your low back. Everything should be nice and upright. And keeping your spine in that nice, neutral position, you're going to slowly lean forward until you feel a stretch in the back of your thigh. You're going to hold that position for 30 seconds to a minute. And then you can slowly back out of it. And that's your hamstring stretch.

Leg Exercise - Standing Hamstring Curl

Commonly Used For: Knee pain or post-surgical recovery.

Video Transcription: I'm going to show you a standing hamstring curl which is an easy way to do some lower level hamstring strengthening which is the muscle on the back of your thigh here. So want you want to do is to find something to hold on to for balance. It can be a chair, counter top, anything that is sturdy. You're going to hold on there, you're going to bend the knee of the leg that you are trying to strengthen. Keeping your thighs parallel to each other; you're going to just bend your knee, up like this, like you're kicking your bottom. You want to make sure that you don't let your knee creep forward, as you do this exercise it should stay in line with your opposite thigh. You're just going to bring it up, just like that and you should feel the muscle on the back of your thigh working. If it's too easy you can strap on an ankle weight to add some more weight to your strengthening exercise, and then do it with that ankle weight strapped on. [Here's a set of ankle weights from Amazon.com.] So that's your basic hamstring curl.