Science Sunday | NFL Preseason Soft Tissue Talk.
Two weeks into the NFL preseason, the injury report reads like a muscle-group inventory.
Hamstrings. Groins. A quad. And a striking number of them happened with a defender nowhere near the play.
Breece Hall went down untouched with a groin issue. Saints rookie Jordyn Tyson is expected to miss roughly two months with a hamstring strain. Luther Burden III and Tyler Warren are both dealing with groins. Jamal Adams tore a quadriceps in Minnesota's preseason opener — the same injury he sustained in 2022, on the opposite leg.
Every August, the same headline appears in a new uniform: this preseason has been brutal.
The pattern is older than this preseason. And it is far more predictable than luck.
Preseason is soft-tissue season, and the data says so
Lower-extremity strains affect roughly one in four NFL players every year. Across the 2015–2019 seasons, researchers documented 5,780 of them: about 55% hamstring, 24% adductor, 13% calf, 8% quadriceps. The largest single share was reported during preseason practices, and the two-week training-camp window alone accounted for 19% of every time-loss strain in the study. (American Journal of Sports Medicine)
A separate ten-year review of NFL injury surveillance found that 51% of all hamstring strains occurred during the seven-week preseason. The preseason practice injury rate ran more than four times the regular-season practice rate. (American Journal of Sports Medicine)
And within camp itself, the risk front-loads. A decade of training-camp data showed injuries clustering in weeks one and two, ahead of weeks three through five. (American Journal of Sports Medicine)
So the timing is knowable. The athlete arrives, the volume of high-speed running climbs steeply, and the tissue that manages deceleration is asked to do the most work it has done in months.
The open question is a different one.
What decides whether a hamstring holds
Most hamstring strains happen at one specific moment: late swing phase, when the leg is still traveling forward and the hamstring is lengthening under high force to slow the shin before the foot lands.
The muscle is long, loaded, and braking — all at once.
Prevention work has focused, sensibly, on making the hamstring better at tolerating that strain. Eccentric strengthening, fascicle length, hamstring-to-quadriceps ratios. Those things matter and the evidence supports them.
There is a second variable, and it receives far less attention: how much strain the hamstring is asked to tolerate in the first place.
That number is set upstream. Sprint mechanics influence the mechanical strain applied to the hamstring, and those mechanics can be modified. (Sports Medicine)
Which is where the pelvis enters.
The hip decides how much work the hamstring inherits
When the pelvis sits in greater anterior tilt during sprinting, the hamstring origin travels farther from its insertion. The muscle is already closer to its length limit before the leg begins its forward swing. The same stride now demands more strain from the same tissue.
When the glutes and trunk participate strongly, the opposite happens. Hip extension is produced more capably by the muscles built to produce it, and the pelvis stays where the hamstring can work from a better position.
This is measurable. A prospective study of male soccer players tracked muscle activity during maximal sprinting, then followed the athletes forward through a season. Players who stayed healthy showed higher gluteus maximus activity during late swing and higher trunk-muscle activity during early swing. The risk of hamstring injury fell by about 20% for each 10% increment in gluteus maximus activity during late swing. (American Journal of Sports Medicine)
Read that again, because it reframes the whole category.
The strongest available predictor of a hamstring injury was measured above the hamstring.
Systematic review work reaches the same place: proximal neuromuscular control, lumbopelvic mechanics, and trunk position are the most consistent biomechanical signals in the sprint-injury literature. Greater gluteal and trunk activation tracks with lower injury occurrence. Greater anterior pelvic tilt tracks with higher susceptibility.
Fatigue changes who does the work
Here is why week one of camp is dangerous, and why the fourth quarter is dangerous, and why mile 18 is dangerous.
Under sprint-induced fatigue, the muscular determinants of horizontal force production shift. Research examining repeated sprinting found that horizontal force became more dependent on the hip extensors and gluteus maximus as fatigue accumulated — the hamstring's contribution changed from its role in the fresh state. (Frontiers in Physiology)
Fatigue reassigns the job.
If the hip is prepared to take that assignment, the system holds. If the glutes fade and the pelvis drifts, the hamstring absorbs a demand that was designed for a larger, stronger muscle — at exactly the moment it is least equipped to absorb it.
The play still gets made. The stride still looks fine at full speed. And then one repetition arrives where the margin is gone.
Where a different approach begins
This is the conversation Tighties was built for.
A strain is treated where it appears. Rehabilitation, understandably, concentrates on the injured tissue.
Tighties begins one level up, with how the body distributes the work before any single tissue reaches its limit.
The Stabilizer aligns the hips and pelvis, cues the muscles that help protect the joints, and helps the lower body operate as one connected system. The Tighties Strapping System™ applies adjustable resistance across the body while the athlete moves, creating sensory input the nervous system can respond to in real time.
The objective is straightforward: help the hip do the hip's job, so the hamstring only does its own.
For an athlete ramping into a season — or a runner building toward a fall marathon — that suggests a specific role:
• Reinforcing pelvic position during high-speed running
• Encouraging glute participation through the phases where it protects the hamstring most
• Supporting the lower body as a connected chain under fatigue
• Helping the athlete feel a compensation while it is happening, at speed
The traditional question asks: how do we make this hamstring stronger?
Tighties asks: how do we make sure the hamstring is only being asked for what it can give?
Both questions deserve an answer. The evidence increasingly suggests the second one has been underweighted.
What we measured
Earlier this year, the Biomechanics Lab at San Diego State University put The Stabilizer through instrumented testing. The early findings point toward improved hip moment, greater glute activation, reduced loading rate, and faster reaction times.
These are early results, and we describe them as directional. The full findings publish in September.
We share them here for one reason: the variables we chose to measure are the same variables the hamstring literature keeps identifying as protective. That alignment is the entire thesis of this company, and it is why we tested what we tested.
What to watch this preseason
Every August the conversation centers on which players are available. The more useful question is a different one.
When an athlete sprints at week two volume, does the pelvis hold its position?
Do the glutes stay in the work as the session goes long?
Does the trunk keep the hip organized in the fourth rep, the fourteenth, the fortieth?
Because availability is a status.
Distributing force well is what keeps producing it.
Move better while you move.
