Hamstring pain.

[Spring]

Hi, I am new to this forum but I am not new to TMS. I have suffered all kinds of TMS pain starting around the age of 25 until now at 50. I can't seem to get rid of it totally but I am aware of it and how it moves around my body and it generally doesn't affect my life and I am not in constant pain.
Mostly I can recognise it and shut it down. But recently I have come out of a stressful few years in my life. Things are finally going well for me and this has ramped up my TMS. During stressful periods my TMS shuts down as my mind is occupied by the stressful things going on it my life. Now that these stressful things have resolved my TMS has come back with vengeance. It is moving around to different areas of body to see what is going to catch my attention and cause me stress. I have been able to fight it off and identify it so far, but recently it has moved to my hamstring to where I have had an injury many years ago. My brain knows this is an area of fear for me as I need to be able to run to compete and this is something that I love and have been training hard for. I have entered two competitions in the next two weekends but I fear now I wont be able to compete due to the pain. I have been training through the pain the past two weeks with some improvement on some days but worse on others. Now it is really occupying my mind a lot with the worry of an injury and not TMS. I have had this pain before but it has gone away quickly once confirmed that I don't have an injury. Today I went to a physio to be examined to see if he could find a structural problem. The result was vague and inconclusive. No red flags as being some serious structural problem but not enough for my brain to feel at ease that I am ok and to keep on going.
So where do I go with this? Keep on pushing through and hope that my brain will give up? The hamstring pain improved last week but it was replaced with a sudden sharp pain in my knee which lasted 24 hours. This I knew was TMS as I was just walking at the time and there was no incident. Once the knee pain resolved the hamstring pain came back.
I feel like I need some support to keep on going....

 

[Adam Coloretti (coach)]

But recently I have come out of a stressful few years in my life. Things are finally going well for me and this has ramped up my TMS. During stressful periods my TMS shuts down as my mind is occupied by the stressful things going on it my life. Now that these stressful things have resolved my TMS has come back with vengeance.

It's great that you're able to recognise this - my first question would be what type of work have you done on the emotional side of things? Because without getting more to the core, then this pattern of the pain finds a new place and you have new structural concerns may continue.

Specific to the hamstring, have you been able to notice recently its connection to stress and emotions? That will definitely help your confidence - also, the fact that no serious structural injury was flagged is a good sign + if it were truly a concern I doubt it would have disappeared for 24 hours to accommodate for your knee. I.e. I doubt your brain would risk turning off the pain protection to your hamstring just because your knee hurts, you would have still been loading your hamstring during that time I presume so it would have still needed protection assuming damage.

I would review Howard Schubiner's FIT criteria if you haven't already and see how many boxes you tick The fact too that you've already had TMS makes this highly likely to be TMS too, especially if you can't point to a specific injury or incident that kicked off this recent hamstring pain (I would also reflect on what was happening emotionally - if you know the pattern of when things slow down TMS comes, then if that is what has happened again here then that is telling).