Today’s show is with athletic performance coach and hamstring injury research specialist, Johan Lahti. Johan is an S&C coach (CSCS) at R5 Athletics & Health in Helsinki, Finland. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. on a multifactorial approach for hamstring injury risk reduction in professional soccer under the supervision of Professor JB Morin and Dr. Pascal Edouard via the University of Cote d’Azur. Johan is a practitioner who truly has a hand in both the worlds of the art and the science of athletic development.
Hamstring strains are not only one of the most common muscular injuries in sport, but also will be more likely to happen once an athlete has had this issue in the past. The human body is a complex organism, and as easy as it can be to pin the cause of an injury to one source, we most always take a broad and holistic approach to these issues. Johan recently did a fantastic explanation of his hamstring injury prevention methods for a Simplifaster interview, where multiple causes and solutions to hamstring problems were addressed, such as running technique vs. hamstring strength training, mobility and hamstring risk, pelvic tilt and more.
In today’s podcast Johan and I chat about an athlete’s strength vs. their raw technique when it comes to lifting, and what resistance training exercises have the greatest impact on the hamstrings from a prevention standpoint. We talk about running technique and hamstring injury, mobility and flexibility, and proprioception, and cognitive demand, all related to hamstring injury risk prevention.
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Timestamps and Main Points
5:31 – What inspired Johan to research hamstrings & His greatest mentors
8:05 – Strength vs. Running technique in hamstring injury prevention
12:43 – Factoring in ultra-specific hamstring training, like Nordic exercises
17:57 – Efficiency in hamstring research and technique
19:59 – Running mechanics: Correlations between on-field running techniques and hamstring injury
23:25 – Factoring in sports that require holding something in your hands while running, like a field hockey stick
24:55 – Stretching and strength training in hamstring injury prevention and mobility/range of motion
32:07 – If you just do max velocity sprint work, will your hamstrings organically get better at end range?
36:48 – Fascicle testing & Sprinting vs. Isolated exercises
42:48 – The best protocol for preventing hamstring injury and keeping hamstrings healthy
44:43 – Lumbopelvic movement measurements & Sprint mechanics
50:41 – Starting at a young age: Building better postures and movement in sprint techniques
53:12 – Thoughts on posterior chain training
“Looking at the hamstrings particularly, it is amazing, not only the sagittal plane or the front to back, but also the rotational component of this muscle group and how it works to help us perform as athletes is absolutely amazing.”
“Let’s say if you’re doing a squat, a force plate can read a specific Newton output but they can produce that force by different strategies so… the end result is the same in terms of Newtons, but are they technically producing strength for different tasks even though it’s defined as a squat? So that is really interesting and I think that should be discussed more. That’s why I don’t like to separate strength and technique… but evidently it needs to be done in terms of research.”
“It’s difficult to answer that question of ‘what is the optimal exercise?’ I think if you’re ticking those boxes, then you could argue that some exercises are doing enough if you have other exercises ticking the rest of the boxes.”
“There’s so much money going into hamstring research, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone picked [time efficiency] up as a research topic… because time is of such high value.”
“We can create these great protocols in the lab, gold standard equipment, but then what’s the use if teams don’t have the budget or time or resources or facilities to conduct these tests? So there needs to be a lot of technological advancement that we can get… with less testing, a good idea of what’s going on. That would be the end goal.”
“There’s supportive biomechanical evidence for lengthening the angle of peak torque in the hamstrings with range of motion training… additionally, that your range of motion is moderately correlated with how much mechanical strain or lengthening past optimal length takes place during sprinting.”
“We shouldn’t just consider the hamstrings, we should consider other muscles that influence the hamstrings that modeling studies have shown that muscles that basically can pull contribute to lengthening the hamstring… and the hip flexors are the most famous for it.”
“Right now, it seems that there are benefits of increasing both of it, fascicle length and pennation angle, depending on what head we’re talking about in the hamstrings.”
“I really want to emphasize that my PhD focuses on soccer, so therefore, these are the categories we have interest in this context. We have four main categories that we thought would realistically fit into schedules and screening protocols, so that would be posterior strength testing, range of motion, lumbopelvic control, and the last one is sprint mechanical output testing.”
About Johan Lahti
Johan Lahti is an S&C coach (CSCS) at R5 Athletics & Health in Helsinki, Finland. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. on a multifactorial approach for hamstring injury risk reduction in professional soccer under the supervision of Professor JB Morin and Dr. Pascal Edouard via the University of Cote d’Azur. Physiotherapist Jurdan Mendiguchia functions as an external supervisor.
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