The hamstring in your muscles lets your knee flex and bend with ease making it possible for you to walk, run, or do any exercise. But what would happen if we misuse our body to the point our hamstring muscles suffer from a tight pull or tear and end up swollen or having inflammation?
It will cause extreme pain to the point that even walking becomes difficult.
This is a common problem that even athletes face, but generally, people can accidentally have upper hamstring pain when sitting again. Naturally, you will want it to heal with treatment, but you should also learn what the causes could be to use the right treatment.
Causes of Upper Hamstring Pain When Sitting
Hamstring muscles are basically like attachments that connect to the hip bone, shin bones, etc. Tendons or tissues connect the hamstring to those areas.
It makes it easier for you to stretch your entire leg from your hips to your feet. But sometimes you will get upper hamstring pain, and here are a few causes as to why that happens:
Position of Your Body
Sometimes when you are sitting or sleeping in an uncomfortable or unhealthy position for hours at a stretch, upper hamstrings can tear or swell. You might not notice the pain immediately.
In most cases, you will realize the pain when you get out of that uncomfortable sitting or sleeping position, and shift to a better position, walk around or stretch.
Amount of Activity
You need to stay active throughout the day. If you stay stuck in one place without moving much for a long time, your upper hamstring will start hurting when you do finally move. It will keep worsening as more time goes by, and you continue to stay inactive in that position.
Past Accidents
If you have had an accident in the past where the tendons in your hamstring muscles were damaged or torn, then its failure to heal completely will be a cause for it to act up and cause pain. This occurs in many athletes who still strain their bodies before any of their hamstring muscle injuries heal.
But even as a regular civilian, you might have had accidents in the areas where your upper hamstring muscles are. The pain will continue the more you stress out your body before healing from the previous injury or pain.
Standing might not pull on that torn hamstring that much, but sitting for a long time might increase the pain since the upper hamstrings are around your hips, and that is where you are bending your body.
Treatment for Upper Hamstring Pain
There are various causes and situations where you might face hamstring pain in your life. It can happen because of an injury you had before, which never got to heal, or because of a certain way you were sitting for long hours.
For every reason this hamstring pain occurs, there will be multiple solutions to look into to avoid this pain and eventually heal it. Some of those solutions are given below:
Exercising
If you have a healthy routine of working out or exercising, then hamstring pain should not affect your daily life that much. But in case you still have pain in your upper hamstring, some specific types of exercises can lessen the pain and possibly heal it completely.
You can try different exercises that focus on your legs and hips. Cycling and swimming are good examples of such exercises. Any other cardiovascular exercise is welcome, as well.
Running, jogging, sprinting, gymnastics, etc. should be avoided, though, since those will only increase the pain if you accidentally tear your hamstring again while doing those. However, slow walks on a treadmill should be fine and harmless.
Massage Therapy
You can try going for massages at a spa or having a friend or family help you with the massaging. Doing it yourself could be more stressful. Body oils or lotions that have medicinal herb essence are also good for healing.
Acupuncture can also be counted in massage therapy. It needs to be done by skilled people, but these work pretty well too when you have tendon or hamstring pain anywhere on your limbs.
Massages should go on for a little longer than exercises do since these are done at a slower pace to give the swollen hamstring tendons the right pressure in the right place and heal them.
Meditational Exercises
Slow exercises like leg stretching, full-body stretching, squats, hamstring stretches, Yoga, Pilates, etc. help increase more body activity without swift movements that could tear the hamstring tendons more.
With these sorts of exercises, you can be calm emotionally, psychologically, and physically. When the overall stress from the inside and outside of your body is gone, the hamstring pain will slowly heal.
Medicine
A quick and easy response to upper hamstring pain is to rely on the wonders of the medical field. Countless medicine in the forms of pills, injections, consumables, etc. have been created by humans. If you are a busy person and cannot fit the other treatment techniques for hamstring pain, medicine will work fine.
Final Words
Having a healthy body without any sort of injury or pain and going about life is typically excellent. But there will be times when you will encounter mental or physical stress.
And upper hamstring pain while sitting is a common injury that most people face, especially if you have a job requiring you to sit at a desk all day long and work.
Maintaining a good exercise routine will help prevent such injuries, but thankfully, you can still use many methods even after you face such a problem.