HAMSTRING INJURIES: WHAT ROLE DOES THE LUMBAR SPINE AND PELVIS PLAY?
PART 1: FORCE CLOSURE OF THE PELVIS AND ANTERIOR PELVIC TILT
FEATURE / NICK METCALFE – Consultant Chiropractor in professional football
Introduction
Last year’s London International Consensus and Delphi Study on hamstring injuries (Paton et al, 2023) involving over 112 physicians, physiotherapists, surgeons, scientists, researchers and trainers reached a level of agreement on aspects of managing hamstring injuries. As part of their study 91% of the experts agreed it was “important to assess, treat and prescribe exercises addressing the whole kinetic chain”. The authors go further and discuss a number of lumbopelvic considerations in hamstring injuries such as pelvis biomechanics, sacroiliac joint mobility, force closure, pelvic control, gluteal activation, iliac asymmetry, neuromuscular inhibition and neural mobility.
In this series of articles, I will be looking into these lumbopelvic contributions to hamstring injuries and trying to distil the current research into a handful of simple clinical take-homes for the assessment of your athletes. In today’s article I will be looking at force closure of the pelvis and anterior pelvic tilt.