Mmmm... bacon!

This week I learned how to use my hamstrings for pedaling a bike.  It was a major epiphany, maybe not as major as figuring out how to create world peace or to eliminate traffic, but major.

Hamstrings are the muscles in the backs of your thighs that complain when you bend over to touch your toes.  They have plenty of reasons to complain.  They get tight from sitting, since they are responsible for flexing your knees, and bored because they help unbend your legs at the hips, which you don’t do much when you are stuck at your desk.  We all love our quadriceps more and tend to focus on working them instead.  Hamstrings feel like Clark Kent to the quadriceps’s Superman.

Strengthening the hamstrings helps with posture.  Strong hamstrings keep your knees safe.  And, when biking for long distances, hamstrings save your quadriceps’ bacon, so to speak; those front-of-the-thigh muscles get awfully worn out and appreciate any other muscle group that might be willing to take over for a while.

Even more important than what I learned was that I learned it.  Fitness is about the brain, too.  Conscious movement strengthens your body’s ability to understand where it is in space.  Your muscles work better when the connections between your nervous system and your muscles are active and quick.  This is why I love to take classes and get personal training sessions—I learn stuff that makes me a better mover.

(And, for those of you who have not already figured out how to use hamstrings in bike pedaling, the key, for me, was thinking about pulling the pedals down from the back of my thighs rather than pushing them down from the front.  Some people find that thinking about leading with their heels or focusing on pulling backwards works the same way.  Go try it out!)