How A Gymnast’s “Tight Hamstrings” Can Really Be a Core Control Problem

Something really interesting happened to me the other night at the gym during practice, and I wanted to share the story. One of my level 8’s told me that she has “really tight hamstrings” and that for some reason no matter how much she stretches her splits or pikes they never get better. I know this gymnast personally, and I know that she is one of the most flexible/hyper mobile girls on our team. So naturally I was thinking there had to be more to this. I decided to take a few minutes to break it down and figure out if it was really a hamstring mobility problem based on a lot of the PT information I’ve been reading/listening to lately. What ended up looking light tight hamstrings and a restricted pike stretch was really a core control /stability problem, and by doing some corrective work I was able to fix what looked like tight hamstrings in about 5 minutes. It all started out with her showing me a pike stretch, where she said she felt a lot of pulling in the back of her legs because of her hamstrings and she could not reach her hands to the floor.

Pre-Test Pike Stretch Suggesting Some “Tightness”

Gymnastics Application of The Joint by Joint Approach (Pt 1): Concepts and Skill Examples

The “Joint by Joint Approach” is a concept created by Gray Cook, and it has been pretty popular in the medical/rehabilitation world for some time now. Many Physical Therapists, Athletic Trainers, and Strength and Conditioning coaches use this concept when working with patients, clients, and athletes.  Although I try to learn and pull from many different schools of thought, I personally am a big fan of Gray Cook’s ideas. In the last 6 months have been using it quite a bit to look into and break down common problems/injuries that gymnasts deal with. Side note I have to mention that inspiration for this post came from Dan Pope’s website which you can find in the references below, his article give’s a great breakdown of this concept.

The Joint by Joint Approach is certainly not a brand new concept, but applying it to gymnastics is on the newer end. I’m sure other people have published on tying these concepts together for the gymnastics benefits. It is not the only approach out there, and as with many ideas it works best when combined when all the other information available. However, I can say that it has really helped me to break down problems when I work with gymnasts (and all other types of people).  I have gotten some good results for complaints of pain, nagging overuse injuries, and increasing gymnasts skill performance from using this model as a framework. For this post I wanted to start by explaining this concept in a very basic way so coaches and gymnast can understand, and then I wanted to give some direct examples of how it applies to gymnastics. I think that it is really something all gymnasts and coaches can benefit from to better understand how to trouble shoot gymnastics skill problems, understand common injuries/pain, and help optimize performance.

The Joint by Joint Approach