Overactive and painful hamstrings and adductors

Hello,

Wonder if anyone can shed some professional light on this. I had to give up playing football, amongst other reasons, because I kept straining what I presumed was my right hamstring with increasing severity. I had been trying to increase my glute strength and activation all this time in order to take the strain off the hamstrings but all posterior chain work did was make the anterior hip feel very weak and my legs feel extremely heavy, like hip flexion has been massively inhibited. Despite having large and strong glutes the hamstring strains kept happening.

Fast forward to now and any posterior chain work (deadlift, SLDL, Romanian deadlift, good mornings) will cause my hamstrings to be so chronically sore and tight for around a week that it has an actual impact on my life. I tried to replace them with hip thrusts to shift emphasis to my glutes but my hamstrings cramp as soon as I start.

Now I initially thought the soreness was in my hamstrings, but it is so medial and runs down to the inside of my knee that I now think a large part of it may be the ischiocondylar portion of my adductor. Either way, anything with hip extension is eliciting an overworking and trauma to both my hamstrings and this particular muscle.

I have limited hip flexion, I am struggle with sitting at my desk as I find it hard to get off my sacrum and end up compensating for that with thoracolumbar extension instead to stay upright, similarly when descending into a squat I get butt wink very early on and an inability to even visualise ‘pulling myself down into the squat’.

As I have said before, from the years of trying to correct this I have developed large glutes, but I think that there is a firing pattern issue. I have done a number of tests like the prone hip extension test and the hamstrings and adductors all kick in before the glutes. It also seems that my hip flexors are inhibited or lax, trying to work them reverses the horrible heavy legged feeling that posterior chain work induces.

Now this is the big one, and I presume what I am about to say now implies that the tightness I have is a protective, neurological tightness, as when I stretch the hamstrings and adductors out my pelvis feels HORRENDOUSLY unstable and my lower back feels like it could give out, it also ramps my nervous system right up, I guess because the body senses it is in danger and pumps out adrenaline.

What do you think could be the cause of this? Obviously I need to try to correct the timing of the firing of the glutes, but I am at a loss as to what could be so unstable in me to cause this considering I have had a very strong empasis on core work (dead bugs, planks, side planks, ab-wheel rollouts, pallof presses), I have also consistently worked on lateral stability with glute medius work. Its like I have done everything by the book but I am missing something.

It was mentioned to me as a possibility that my psoas may be weak, and it provides segmental stability and my pathetic hip flexion ability.

Any ideas or avenues for me to investigate would be great, as would any ideas on correcting the glute timing (bridges, cook hip lifts etc all make my hamstrings cramp, quadruped hip extensions give me a horrible almost torsion like pain in the knee of the working side). It should also be noted that I have quite a flat lumbar spine, particularly under load, so there is no excessive anterior pelvic tilting creating the illusion of tightness.

Cheers!