Johan Lahti on Holistic Assessment and Programming for Hamstring Injury Prevention

Today’s show is with athletic performance coach and hamstring injury research specialist, Johan Lahti.  Johan is an S&C coach (CSCS) at R5 Athletics & Health in Helsinki, Finland. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. on a multifactorial approach for hamstring injury risk reduction in professional soccer under the supervision of Professor JB Morin and Dr. Pascal Edouard via the University of Cote d’Azur.  Johan is a practitioner who truly has a hand in both the worlds of the art and the science of athletic development. Hamstring strains are not only one of the most common muscular injuries in sport, but also will be more likely to happen once an athlete has had this issue in the past.  The human body is a complex organism, and as easy as it can be to pin the cause of an injury to one source, we most always take a broad and holistic approach to these issues.  Johan recently did a fantastic explanation of his hamstring injury prevention methods for a Simplifaster interview, where multiple causes and solutions to hamstring problems were addressed, such as running technique vs. hamstring strength training, mobility and hamstring risk, pelvic tilt and more. In today’s podcast Johan and I chat about an athlete’s strength vs. their raw technique when it comes to lifting, and what resistance training exercises have the greatest impact on the hamstrings from a prevention standpoint.  We talk about running technique and hamstring injury, mobility and flexibility, and proprioception, and cognitive demand, all related to hamstring injury risk prevention. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs.  For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to www.lostempireherbs.com/justfly View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:31 - What inspired Johan to research hamstrings & His greatest mentors 8:05 - Strength vs. Running technique in hamstring injury prevention 12:43 - Factoring in ultra-specific hamstring training, like Nordic exercises 17:57 - Efficiency in hamstring research and technique 19:59 - Running mechanics: Correlations between on-field running techniques and hamstring injury 23:25 - Factoring in sports that require holding something in your hands while running, like a field hockey stick 24:55 - Stretching and strength training in hamstring injury prevention and mobility/range of motion 32:07 - If you just do max velocity sprint work, will your hamstrings organically get better at end range? 36:48 - Fascicle testing & Sprinting vs. Isolated exercises 42:48 - The best protocol for preventing hamstring injury and keeping hamstrings healthy 44:43 - Lumbopelvic movement measurements & Sprint mechanics 50:41 - Starting at a young age: Building better postures and movement in sprint techniques 53:12 - Thoughts on posterior chain training “Looking at the hamstrings particularly, it is amazing, not only the sagittal plane or the front to back, but also the rotational component of this muscle group and how it works to help us perform as athletes is absolutely amazing.” “Let’s say if you’re doing a squat, a force plate can read a specific Newton output but they can produce that force by different strategies so… the end result is the same in terms of Newtons, but are they technically producing strength for different tasks even though it’s defined as a squat? So that is really interesting and I think that should be discussed more. That’s why I don’t like to separate strength and technique… but evidently it needs to be done in terms of research.” “It’s difficult to answer that question of ‘what is the optimal exercise?’ I think if you’re ticking those boxes, then you could argue that some exercises are doing enough if you have other exercises ticking the rest of the boxes.” “There’s so much money going into hamstring research, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone picked [time efficiency] up as a researc...