What is the Shanban?

The Shanban is a unique product designed to aid athletes in their pursuit to return to sport, and more specifically, through their rehabilitation and recovery from a hamstring injury.

The Shanban helps bridge the gap between rehabilitation and performance by allowing athletes to seamlessly transition through a crucial and often very challenging phase of hamstring injury rehabilitation – advancing from the jog to the sprint.

Jogging vs Sprinting

While walking, jogging, or cycling, forces are developed more slowly and in a repetitive or cyclic fashion. In these examples, the length changes in the rectus femoris (quadricep) and semitendinosus (hamstring) are relatively small throughout much of the activation cycle. Therefore, the hamstring muscle avoids repetitive cycles of storing and immediately releasing relatively large amounts of energy.

Hamstring Injuries

It is well understood that hamstring strains most often occur in the front leg during the running gait cycle, as the hamstrings act eccentrically to control the rapid hip flexion and knee extension actions. Furthermore, we know that once strained, re-injury to the hamstring in this exact manner is very common, whether this occurs in the later stages of rehabilitation or once returned to sport.

A lack of ability to gradually transition the recovering hamstring from the ability to withstand low force, cyclical type of movements, to the ability to be able to withstand the high energy, rapid and near full contraction of the rectus femoris as the hip and knee extend in the front half of the running gait cycle, may exist.

The Problem Solver

Enter the Shanban. When wearing the Shanban system, the resistance band inherently will resist the front leg moving into hip flexion and knee extension, thereby actually assisting the hamstring muscle in passively resisting this rapid action of the rectus femoris. In essence, it mitigates or absorbs some of the forces that the hamstring otherwise would withstand during this action.

As the hamstring grows more accustomed to absorbing this rapid force, the Shanban system may be progressed by reducing the band tension or interchanging the band with a lighter resistance. Eventually, the athlete will work toward full stride with the lightest available resistance band, before finally progressing to removing the band completely.