If we use our Hamstrings so much when we run then why do my quads hurt after I run.
What am I doing wrong?
jaretj
I have the same problem… please teach me
You’re not doing anything wrong if there are any hills involved. Do your quads hurt after a track workout ( assuning no intervals)?
Hills=quads
it is not from use for propulsion that your quads hurt but that they are working to cushion the blow of your feet hitting the ground. This soreness in the quads is even worse after a long run or downhill run where the step down action is even greater. Some of this can be mitigated by doing eccentric strength work on your quads. Stand on a ledge with one foot and the other floating off it. SLOWLY lower yourself to the point of a slight knee bend (20-30sec) and then come back up. 10 times each leg. When i first did this i was amazed at how sore i was the next day… then began trying it with added weights and it was even more daunting… never is very hard but really is good for putting off the stress to the quads.
I am going to take a guess and say that you are a heel striker, right? I was too and this was something that i used to experience after many of my long runs. What is happening is that when your heel and foot reach out in front of your body and then LAND you are essentially slamming on the brakes and all that forward motion is coming to a halt… well the only thing to cushion that over-reaching, braking blow is your quads… this is why those with better form break down less over longer distances.
hope this helps… good luck
Because the quads are in contracture while lengthening to deccerlate forward momentum. This is harder on a muscle than pure contracture moving a joint/body part through it’s ROM.
Best example: do a biceps curl. It is much harder on the bicep to lower the weight slowly (i.e. contracting while lengthening) than to raise the weight (i.e. contracting while shortening).
Hope this helps!
No, not really
jaretj
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Increasing your cadence to 180 footstrikes per minute, shortening your stride, and landing on your forefoot might help.
That make sense.
No I’m not a heel striker anymore and my quads don’t hurt nearly as much as they did 2 years ago, but my last long run was a bit hilly and that would explain why I was a bit sore. It’s also possible that sometimes I’ll get lazy with my form and for a few minutes at a time I might be heel striking and not notice it.
I’ll keep better tabs on that,
Thanks.
jaretj
I was reading something like that in the book “The Lore of Running”, I guess that goes back to braking (heel striking) or maybe I was running too tense.
jaretj
I’m 185 to 190 fpm
I’m a short guy
jaretj
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Below is some info on creating propulsion without overusing the quads. Ken Creating Efficient Horizontal Propulsion © 2004 by Ken Mierke
Despite what most runners and their coaches believe, technique plays an enormous role in sustained fast running. Most runners’ subscribe to one of two basic paradigms of propulsion. Unfortunately, both are flawed. One creates more upward propulsion than forward and the other isolates a relatively small, weak muscle group instead of harnessing a number of muscles to work together to produce propulsion. Learning to use large muscle groups to create horizontal propulsion with minimal vertical oscillation will help you run further and faster.
Upward Thrust Method
One challenge for runners is creating propulsion as close to purely horizontal as possible. Excessive vertical displacement increases the energy cost of running dramatically. The most common method runners use to develop propulsion is the upward thrust. At toe off, the knee is straightened forcefully, thrusting the body up and forward.
This technique wastes a tremendous amount of energy, leads to local muscular fatigue in the quadriceps, and slows turnover.
As indicated by the large black arrow in the illustration, the direction of the force created by extending the knee is slightly forward, but mostly upward. The extended flight time decreases turnover, more than offsetting the slight increase in stride length, resulting in slower running speed and increased energy cost. This up and down method of running, employed to some degree by most runners, is extremely inefficient. If an athlete’s quadriceps fatigue during long runs even at easy pace, he probably subscribes to the upward thrust paradigm of propulsion.
The quadriceps muscles work in the vertical plane. On flat ground, the quadriceps should only contract at the moment foot-strike to hold the body up. The quadriceps should minimize knee bend at foot-strike, catching bodyweight, but should not create propulsion. This is especially important for triathletes, who must run with quadriceps fatigued from the bike.
Pull Through Method
Another common error of propulsion is the pull through. This runner avoids the upward thrust push-off, instead creating propulsion by bending the knee and pulling his body forward with the hamstring muscles. This running style is reasonably energy efficient; it does minimize vertical displacement and landing impact. The problem with this running style is the demand that it places on the hamstring muscles.
The hamstring muscles are a relatively small and weak muscle group. When they are almost exclusively responsible for propulsion, they fatigue easily. Using larger muscles, along with the hamstrings, enables a runner to take advantage of the benefits of the energy-efficient (horizontal) style, but prevents local muscular fatigue in the hamstrings by spreading the workload over greater muscle mass.
If an athlete suffers from hamstring fatigue or cramping during long or hard runs, while the rest of the body feels fairly comfortable, he probably uses pull-through propulsion. Learning to engage more muscle for propulsion while maintaining the horizontal movement will increase speed and endurance.
Foot Drag
The two common errors of creating propulsion for running involve movement at the knee. Optimal technique for creating propulsion when running on flat ground requires a constant knee angle through the propulsive phases of the stride cycle.
I call the recommended technique the foot-drag movement. It involves pivoting the leg backward from the hip with the entire leg as a fixed unit. The knee should be slightly bent, but the knee angle should not change from just before foot-strike, through the period of contact with the ground, to the follow-through. Through the entire propulsion phase, the knee angle should be slightly bent and constant. This technique accomplishes a number of goals of efficient, fast, sustained running.
First, the foot-drag movement creates almost perfectly horizontal propulsion. Vertical displacement, and all the problems associated with it, can be minimized. Newton’s Law states that “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. It follows that, in order to create horizontal propulsion, we must pull straight back against the ground instead of pushing down into the ground. The foot-drag movement accomplishes this goal.
The foot-drag movement also takes advantage of the attachment points of the muscles on the posterior aspect of the hips and thighs and spreads the work of propulsion among a much larger muscle mass than other methods of propulsion. Using greater muscle mass to accomplish a certain amount of work decreases the relative intensity of the work for each muscle. If more muscles are doing the same amount of work, each muscle is working more easily.
The hamstring muscles are unusual in that they cross two major joints. The hamstrings attach above the hip, cross both the hip and the knee joints, and attach below the knee. Due to this unique attachment, they serve two major functions: extending the hip joint and flexing the knee joint. The gluteus maximus muscles, on the other hand, cross only one major joint, the hip. The glute muscles only major action is hip extension.
The pull-through method of propulsion creates nearly horizontal propulsion, but it fails to engage the largest and strongest muscle in the body, the glutes. Which do you think would be stronger, your hamstring muscles, or your hamstring muscles and your glutes working together? That answer is obvious. If knee flexion is the primary producer of propulsion, the hamstrings have to create the force by themselves. By using hip extension instead of knee flexion to create propulsion, the hamstrings work in conjunction with the glutes, therefore each muscle is required to produce less force. Obviously, this minimizes fatigue.
Pull-through runners frequently have extremely tight hip-flexors, preventing correct hip extension. Stretching these muscles will enable you to incorporate better technique for developing propulsion, allowing you to create high levels of horizontal propulsion without local muscular fatigue.
Developing a stride which uses hip extension as the primary method of propulsion will enable runners to move more horizontally and to use large muscle groups to do the work. This will allow you to run farther and faster that ever before.
your quads would be more affected from a hilly run due to the down hills which would create a more eccentric muscle contraction caused by deceleration – ( contraction on the muscle while it is lengthening – not shortening) Eccentric contraction creates a greater development of tiny tears in the muscle facia which in turn develops Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS. If your quads are bothered when running flats then you may be doing too much up and down and not enough forward propulsion. Just my 2 cents 
Thanks everyone, this has really helped me a lot.
I done the Foot Drag as you described and the best explaination of how I feel while doing it is that I feel like I’m running very free. As if my legs are allways behind me and my body is leaning very forward. I have found that if I keep my hands lower in front of me and take a bit more back-swing, this position is much easier to achieve.
I was under the impression that my hands needed to swing forward more to develop a powerful stride but what that did was make my body lean back slightly and put me on my heels. For a few months I have worked with a lower-rearward arm position that has got me leaning forward but I think sometimes I get lazy and lose concentration and go back to my old habits for a few minutes at a time. I didn’t know if this lower-rearward arm position was right but it seems to work well for me
Thanks again for everyone’s help. I would really like to find a local run clinic and have someone look at my stride.
jaretj
If we use our Hamstrings so much when we run then why do my quads hurt after I run.
What am I doing wrong?
jaretj
Just because you use a muscle doesn’t mean it is going to hurt after you use it. Muscles hurt because they have been damaged, not just used. Damage from running probably comes from either poor form or use beyond training (overuse injury). My guess is you are a heel striker and using the muscle in eccentric contraction as described by somebody else (poor form), or it isn’t your quads you are feeling at all and, rather, your hip flexors (overuse inury).
One more thing, most of the time in the running stroke is spent with the foot off the ground. The faster one goes the less percentage of the time is the foot on the ground. This makes the recovery essential to running fast (and what we think PC’s are doing for people to make them faster). If you only concentrate on the push-off you are unlikely to see any great speed gains because you are likely to worsen your back mechanics.
What you are describing as having done as a result of this thread sounds strange. So, I suspect your form sucks. I would get yourself to a good running coach and let them analyze your form and go from there.
Just remembered about this thread I started over a year ago, I seem to be the opposite now with my hamstrings being a little sore after runs vs. my quads.
Thanks again for everyones help with it, it proves that I can learn something from ST.
Whatever happened to Ken Mierke?
jaretj