Why I Didn’t
Fix the
Hamstring
A young sprinter came in with a recurring hamstring injury. I spent one second looking at the photo her mom handed me — and knew we weren’t going to treat the hamstring at all.
I Thought We Were
Replacing a Tire.
I remember the day Tegan Wilson limped into my gym.
She was a young, up-and-coming sprinter with a hamstring that kept letting her down at the worst moments. Think of an F1 car that had blown a tire — she had pulled into Jungle Athletics for what everyone assumed was a simple repair.
At the time, I thought we were replacing a tire.
What we actually ended up doing was rebuilding the engine. After about fifteen minutes of conversation with Tegan and her mom, I asked if they had any photos of her racing. Her mom picked up her phone and started scrolling.
I knew what was happening. She was looking for the right one. Not just any race photo — the one where Tegan looked good. The one a proud mom would be comfortable showing a coach she’d just met. The one where she was winning.
She found it and handed me the phone.
The day the rebuild began at Jungle Athletics.
I looked at it for about one second.
I already knew. The hip wasn’t controlling the forces coming through it. The knee was collapsing inward because the hip above it had no choice. The shoulders were rotating because the trunk below them wasn’t stable. The hands — look at the hands — clenched tight under the strain of a body searching for stability it couldn’t find in the right place.
And this was a girl who was about to compete at the Junior Olympics. Who would go on to race at the NCAA level. Who had a long, serious sprinting career ahead of her.
One second to see it. Then I pretended to keep looking for another twenty.
Her competitors show clean vertical stacking from hip to knee to ankle. She doesn’t. The inward knee collapse under ground reaction force, the hip that can’t control load, the rotational instability in the shoulders — all visible in a single frame. She was winning the race. She was losing a different one.
The 20 Seconds
I wasn’t studying the photo. I already had what I needed.
I was trying to figure out how to explain to a high-level sprinter and her mother — a girl who was explosive, who was winning races, who was heading to the Junior Olympics — that the single most important thing she could do for her career right now was to lie down on her back and practice breathing.
That’s what those 20 seconds were for.
The Thing Nobody
Wants to Hear
Here’s the problem with being a great athlete: you come in looking for something that matches who you are. You want the next gear. You want a technical adjustment. You want the work to feel hard and purposeful and proportional to your level.
You don’t come in to lie on your back.
But that’s exactly where we had to start. Because what I was looking at in that photo wasn’t a hamstring problem. It wasn’t even a hip problem. It was a stability problem — and it was located somewhere that most coaches, most programs, and most treatment plans never look.
The hamstring keeps getting hurt because it keeps being asked to do a job that isn’t its job. It’s stabilizing a system that was never stable to begin with. You can treat the hamstring forever. It will keep tearing. Because you’re fixing the symptom and ignoring the cause.
Stability Comes
Before Speed.
Always.
A newborn grabs stability wherever it can. So did Tegan — at full sprint speed.
There’s a reason newborns clench their fists. It’s not habit. It’s compensation.
The deep stabilizing muscles of the trunk — the diaphragm, the deep abdominal wall, the pelvic floor working together as a system — haven’t fully activated yet. So the body does what bodies do: it finds stability somewhere else. The extremities tighten. The fists close. The system locks down what it can.
That’s not a baby problem. That’s a nervous system strategy. And it doesn’t go away just because you grow up. It goes dormant — until something disrupts the deep stabilizing system, and the body falls back on the same solution it learned before it could walk.
Look at Tegan’s hands in the race photo. Then look at the baby.
The hands never lie — clenched fists under sprint stress reveal a trunk that can’t find stability where it needs it.
Same pattern. 27 km/hr.
- Diaphragm, abdominal wall, and pelvic floor coordinate as a system
- Ribcage stacks over the pelvis — the trunk becomes a cylinder
- The hip can center and control force under load
- The limbs move efficiently — hands relax
- Body finds stability in the extremities instead
- Hands clench — the sprinter’s version of the newborn’s fists
- Lumbar spine overextends to create rigidity the trunk can’t
- Hip collapses, knee tracks inward, hamstring absorbs what it shouldn’t
This is the framework behind Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization — DNS. The idea that movement dysfunction in high-level athletes often traces back to a loss of the deep stability that the nervous system develops in infancy. The body has a developmental sequence. When that sequence breaks down, compensation fills the gap. And compensation, at sprint speed, under competition load, eventually tears something.
This isn’t textbook material for me. Before I worked with Tegan, I had completed two in-person DNS courses under three of the methodology’s senior certified instructors. Robert Lardner, PT and David D. Juehring taught me Part 1. Petra Valouchova, MPT, PhD taught me Part 2 in Vancouver, November 21–23, 2016.
Valouchova has been a certified DNS instructor since 2002 and runs Professor Pavel Kolar’s Centre of Movement Medicine in Prague — one of two private clinics owned by the founder of the methodology himself. She also lectures in physical therapy at Charles University Medical School and has published research on surface electromyography in motor control.
The dead bug progression I used with Tegan, the diaphragmatic breathing work, the crawling patterns — those came directly from the people Kolar trained personally to teach his system. The Prague School of Rehabilitation is where this methodology was built, and the path from there to this gym in Calgary runs through three of its most experienced instructors.
We Started
on Her Back
The hands tell the story. Clenched tight under sprint stress — the trunk searching for stability in the extremities because it can’t find it in the right place.
I want to be honest about something. They had been sent to me by another client — which meant I had some credibility walking in. And I used all of it. Right away.
It was early in my career. Money was tight. And there were two voices in my head during those twenty seconds I spent pretending to look at the photo.
The first one said: treat the hamstring. Give them what they came for. You need the work.
The second one said: you will never be a great coach if you don’t have the courage to tell them what the real problem is.
I went with the second voice. And then I did something I’d never done with a client before.
I lay down on the floor.
Right there in the gym, in front of this elite junior sprinter and her mother, I got down on my back like a newborn. I asked the mom to think back — really think back — to when Tegan couldn’t move. When she was brand new. When the arms were up and the fists were closed and the body hadn’t figured out yet how to be stable.
Then I reached up and took Tegan’s finger the way a baby grabs yours — and I didn’t let go.
I showed them the arch. The way a newborn’s back curves when the deep system isn’t engaged yet — and then I showed them the same arch in the race photo. The shirt riding up at the front. The lumbar spine overextending to find the rigidity the trunk couldn’t provide any other way.
I looked up at Tegan from the floor.
She didn’t believe a word of it.
I could see it in her eyes. This wasn’t skepticism — it was a wall. She was an explosive, gifted sprinter heading to the Junior Olympics, and some coach was lying on the ground asking her to think about being a baby. It was, honestly, a completely reasonable response.
It was a war. To her enormous credit — she did it anyway.
— Greg Almon, Jungle Athletics CalgaryShe got down. She practiced that day. She came back and practiced again.
I’ll tell you what helped: the Chinese national team. The Olympic credential. In those early years, a lot of my athletes thought I was out of my mind. The work I was asking them to do looked nothing like what they expected. The proof of Vancouver 2010 was often the only thing standing between me and a polite goodbye. With Tegan, it bought me the time I needed.
We started with the dead bug. A position that mirrors the earliest developmental pattern in the human nervous system. From there we rebuilt the foundation: diaphragmatic breathing, ribcage position, pelvic alignment — the ability to stabilize the trunk in a way that finally let the hip do its actual job.
Then crawling variations. Developmental patterns from DNS methodology that most people associate with physical therapy, not elite sprint training. Not because we were treating an injury — because we were restoring a sequence the body had lost.
Only after that did we reintroduce sprint mechanics.
What Happened Next
Once the deep stability came back, things started resolving that we hadn’t directly addressed. The hip controlled force the way it was supposed to. The knee tracked cleanly. The shoulders stopped rotating. The arm carriage normalized.
And the hands relaxed.
That was the moment I always watch for. When the hands relax at full speed, the trunk has found its job again. The system isn’t searching anymore.
She no longer looked like a body fighting itself. She looked efficient. And efficiency at sprint speed is what separates the athletes who stay healthy from the ones who keep ending up in the treatment room with the same injury on the same side in the same situation, wondering why nothing sticks.
Tegan went on to compete at the Junior Olympics. She raced at the NCAA level. She had the career that was always waiting for her — she just needed the foundation that would let her body actually express it.
Brutus Hamilton Challenge — powerful, upright, and injury-free.
The same athlete. The same race photo the mom was proud to show me. Now I know exactly what I’m looking at — and so does Tegan.
The Body Doesn’t
Hide What It’s Doing.
We are trained — as coaches, as parents, as athletes — to fix what we can see. The hamstring that keeps pulling. The knee that won’t settle. The shoulder that keeps rotating. Chase the symptom, apply the treatment, move on.
But what we see is rarely where it started.
The mom who handed me her phone that day was proud of that photo because her daughter was winning. She had no idea she’d just handed me everything I needed to find the real problem. The body doesn’t hide what it’s doing. It shows you, in every frame, at every speed, under every load.
You just have to know what to look for.
And sometimes, what you find is that the most powerful thing you can ask an elite sprinter to do is the thing that looks least like elite sprinting.
Development System Explained
If this story is your first introduction to Jungle Athletics, the stability and movement work above is one piece of a larger training system. Before booking, most parents find it useful to understand how the methodology, the Battery Model, and the injury prevention layer all connect.
We’ll Find the
Real Problem.
Not the Symptom.
Book your athlete’s Free Movement Analysis. We’ll assess stability patterns, movement quality, and whether compensation is limiting their performance — then tell you exactly what needs to change.
Book Your Free Athlete Analysis
134 71 Ave SE · Calgary, AB T2H 0L9 · 403-462-8424
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