You don’t pull hamstrings because you sprint
Someone pulls up. Hand goes to the back of the leg, that particular half-turn every player recognises, and the session stops. And then the thing that happens next is almost always the same: for the following month, that athlete does less running.
It is the most intuitive response available. It is also, according to one of the more experienced voices in the field, close to backwards.
What Derek Hansen actually argues
Derek Hansen has spent a career on two things — developing speed, and getting injured athletes back onto a field. His position on soft-tissue injury is uncomfortable if you coach the way most of us were coached: athletes in team sport do not get hurt because they sprint. They get hurt because they had not been sprinting, and then the game asked them to anyway.
The logic is not complicated. Tissue tolerates what it is regularly exposed to. A hamstring that sees genuine top-end speed every week is a hamstring that has been repeatedly told what that demand feels like. One that has spent six weeks doing tempo runs, shuttles and “fitness” has not been told anything of the sort — and the game does not care. At some point in the second half, chasing something down, it will hit full stretch at full speed with no notice.
The exposure was going to happen. The only real question was whether it happened on your terms, on a Tuesday, fresh, in a controlled dose — or on a Saturday, tired, at the worst possible moment.
Two details that decide whether it works
Saying “sprint more” is where most of the misreading starts, so the details matter more than the headline.
Speed is a skill, so it is trained fresh. Sprint work belongs at the start of a session and early in the week. Not the end. The end is where sprinting gets used as a finisher, a conditioning block, or a punishment — and a fatigued sprint is not the same exercise. Mechanics degrade, the pattern you are grooving is a slower and worse one, and you are loading tissue that has nothing left. That is not speed work with a bonus. It is risk with none of the benefit.
Conditioning is not a substitute. Running a lot and running fast are separate qualities requiring separate sessions, and the two get confused constantly in amateur sport. A player can be extremely fit and still have no recent exposure to maximum velocity. In fact that combination — high volume, no top speed — is close to the profile you would design if you wanted to hurt someone.
There is a third piece that belongs to the return-to-play conversation, and it is the one I would want every parent to hear. Hansen’s line on rehabilitation is that an athlete who has not reached top speed during their return has not finished it, regardless of how good the leg feels. Feeling fine at 80% tells you nothing about 100%, because 100% is a different demand, not more of the same one. If nobody has made you sprint properly before you play, you have not been cleared. You have been guessed at.
Why the intuition is so strong
The reason the backwards version persists is that the evidence is loud and immediate in one direction and silent in the other.
When an athlete tears something during a sprint, everybody sees it. There is a moment, a cause, a story. When an athlete tears something because of eight weeks of not sprinting, there is no moment to point at — the cause is an absence, and absences do not make a sound.
So the sport learns the lesson that is easy to see. Sprinting hurt him. Do less of it.
This is also why the response to a scare tends to make the next one more likely. Reduce the exposure, and tolerance falls further. The player returns to a game whose demands have not changed at all, with tissue less prepared than before, and the second injury reads as confirmation that they are simply injury-prone.
What it looks like in an actual week
Almost nothing. That is the part people struggle with.
A real top-speed exposure for a team-sport athlete is four to six runs of 20 to 40 metres, at genuine full effort, with two to three minutes of walking between each one. Fresh legs. Start of the session. Total sprinting time: under half a minute.
It should feel like not enough. It is supposed to. The rest between runs is not softness — it is the only way the next rep happens at the speed that makes it worth doing. Cut the rest and you have quietly converted a speed session into a conditioning session, which was the mistake you were trying to avoid.
Once a week, in-season, is a serious intervention. Not once a block. Not when there is time.
For parents and junior coaches
This is where I think it matters most, because junior programs are where the pattern gets set.
Most young athletes get a great deal of running and almost no sprinting. They do shuttles, laps, small-sided games, and a lot of movement at maybe 70 to 85% — the pace at which you can keep going. What they rarely get is a small number of genuinely maximal runs, on fresh legs, with real rest.
Then they hit fifteen or sixteen, the game gets faster, and a generation of kids starts pulling hamstrings while being told they need to stretch more.
If you run junior sessions, the fix costs you five minutes. Put a short sprint block near the front, after the warm-up, before anything tiring. Make the rest generous enough that it looks lazy to a watching parent. That is the session working.
And if your child is coming back from a soft-tissue injury, the question worth asking the physio is a specific one: has he actually sprinted at full speed yet? Not “does it feel okay.” Not “can he do the running.” Has he been to top speed, and did it hold.
What I would not claim
Sprinting is not a vaccine. Athletes with excellent speed exposure still get hurt, and hamstring injury has a long list of contributors — previous injury being the strongest of them, along with fatigue, workload spikes, and how much high-speed running the sport itself demands.
Nothing here is a rehabilitation protocol. If you are injured now, that is a conversation with a physiotherapist who can see your leg, not with an article.
What I am confident about is the direction of the error. In the amateur game, and in a lot of the professional one, the reflex after a soft-tissue injury is to reduce exposure to speed. And the coaches who spend their working lives on this specific problem keep saying the same thing: the exposure was not the problem. The gap was.
Do this week
If you play: one top-speed block, at the start of a session, fully recovered. Four to six runs, 20 to 40 metres, walk back and then some. Note the date, because the honest question is not whether you sprint — it is when did you last actually hit top speed, and most players cannot answer it.
If you coach: look at where sprinting sits in your session plan. If it is at the end, move it. That single change costs nothing and is probably the highest-value thing in this article.