Tash's Story: Triathlete working to rehab Hamstring Tendinopathy

I met Tash in October 2017.  Tash a 30 year old engineer and triathlete came to me through a recommendation from one of my triathlon teammates.  Tash’s goal was to compete in Ironman triathlons.

Tash had been diagnosed by her physio Nathan from Chiswick Physio as having insertional tendinopathy of the hamstring and advised to allow the hamstring to settle initially, strengthen the glutes in the interim and once the injury settled to increase hamstring strength too.  The injury meant no running for Tash for around 3 months, which was obviously an extreme blow.

Tash contacted me to help her with her strength training and injury rehab.  When I took Tash on she hadn’t really done any strength and conditioning or resistance training work so as a triathlete doing hours of endurance training she was very vulnerable to injury.  She was obviously feeling very down about the situation but I reassured her that with her already proactive nature she would make a good comeback and in most cases people come back stronger from injury.

Our goal with Tash was not only to rehab her injury but also to future bulletproof her and build her overall strength and resilience to help increase her performance in triathlon by giving her the ability to move with strength, efficiency and elasticity and hold her form under fatigue.

Tash had also had piriformis and Achilles issues.

Initially I saw Tash once a month to give her some movements each time to go away to work on.  In her first session with me we looked at her biomechanics. I watched her as she came into the gym and took her through a few basic movements to see how she moved.  Upon assessment her pelvic alignment was key to address and therefore rib cage alignment too. She also struggled to stand on one leg without her pelvis dropping and didn’t have the strength in the surrounding muscles around it to hold her there.  With Tash’s pelvis in an anterior tilt and her inability to maintain a relatively neutral pelvis through running the hamstrings were chronically under tension.

We started by educating pelvic position and rib cage alignment on the ground with a lot of isometric work including iso deadbugs, iso crawls, bridge holds and 90/90’s.  We then progressed onto tall kneeling, half kneeling and finally standing variations as Tash mastered the movements at each stage. Next was taking it to standing, both double and single leg variations first isometrically then adding movement all the time working on her proprioception.  We gradually built in working on all three planes of motion and some plyometric work too.

With the commitment Tash put in outside of her gym sessions with me her injury healed well and she went onto compete in many Ironman Triathlons and extremely successfully too!

Tash continues to work on her strength training built into her swim, bike and run session training programme so that it is manageable with the obvious already heavy training load whilst keeping her stronger, more resilient and injury free.

Tash saw me for a programme every 4-8 weeks, changing as appropriate and within her racing season schedule.