Hamstring Attack: 7 Amazing Exercises to Strengthen Your Hamstrings
Efficient Hamstring Movements: The 7 Best Exercises For Hamstring Strength
Hamstring exercises can help you make the most of your lower-body workout.
Maintain a healthy balance in your routine with these 7 efficient strengthening exercises!
The author Neringa Maisonyté trains her hamstrings, so she can do stuff like this!
The hamstring is a large, powerful muscle that takes up around one-third of the mass in your legs.
By preventing common hamstring injuries, minimising muscle imbalances and increasing overall strength and size in your legs, you can protect your hamstrings.
The hamstrings are a group of three muscles located on the posterior side of the thigh.
Although it's natural for your quadriceps to be slightly stronger than your hamstrings, a significant muscular imbalance might lead to knee soreness or injury in the future, especially if you frequently engage in activities like sprinting, jumping or squatting.
In this article, we’ll delve into the anatomy of the hamstrings, discuss the importance of training them, highlight 7 efficient exercises and provide a few useful tips for optimal hamstring development.
A Bit of Anatomy…
The hamstrings originate from the ischial tuberosity, a bony prominence in the pelvis. The biceps femoris, the largest of the three muscles, is divided into a long head and a short head.
The semitendinosus and semimembranosus muscles lie on the medial side of the biceps femoris.
All three muscles merge into tendons, which cross the knee joint and attach to the tibia and fibula.
The hamstrings act as primary knee flexors and secondary hip extensors, helping to control movement and stability during various activities.
Importance of Training the Hamstrings
Muscle Balance
Developing strong and balanced hamstring muscles is essential for overall muscle symmetry, joint stability and injury prevention.
Neglecting hamstring training while focusing solely on quadriceps development can create muscle imbalances and increase the risk of knee injuries.
Athletic Performance
The hamstrings play a vital role in many athletic movements, such as sprinting, jumping and changing direction.
Well-trained hamstrings enhance explosiveness, speed and power, enabling athletes to excel in sports performance.
Posture and Lower Back Health
Strong hamstrings contribute to good posture by helping to maintain a neutral pelvic alignment.
Weak hamstrings can lead to excessive anterior pelvic tilt, which places additional stress on the lower back and can result in discomfort and potential injury.
The 7 Most Efficient Hamstring Exercises
1. Stiff-Legged Deadlift
The stiff-legged deadlift is used to work your hamstrings. This exercise differs from the leg curl machine. With leg curls, you work the lower and mid hamstrings, in particular.
But, with the stiff-legged deadlift, you focus on the upper part of your legs. Proper form is required for this lift, as you don’t want to involve your back too much.
Former international gymnast Neringa Masionyte shows off the perfect technique for stiff-legged deadlifts!
2. Glute-Ham Raises
Without ever touching a weight, lifters can employ the glute-ham raise to develop muscle fitness and hypertrophy in the hamstring, glutes and lower back.
Other exercises like the Romanian deadlift, good morning and stiff-legged deadlift have their place too - and they’re crucial if you're at risk of hurting yourself or if you just want to give your joints a rest from the punishing pounding of iron.
3. Romanian Deadlifts
Romanian deadlifts isolate the hamstrings while minimising involvement from other muscle groups.
It is advised to keep the bar as near to your body as possible throughout the RDL exercise if you do not feel your hamstrings contracting.
This will enable you to carry bigger loads while maintaining a pushed-back position for your glutes and hips.
Next, squeeze your shoulder blades together while maintaining a high chest position throughout the whole range of motion. To strengthen your core stability, exhale deeply before each rep and contract your abs.
4. Hamstring Curls
Using a hamstring curl machine or resistance bands, hamstring curls isolate and target the hamstring muscles.
Both seated and lying hamstring curl variations can be performed to effectively train the hamstrings. To make sure the hamstring is working, maintain full stillness in your hips, core and upper body.
Also, take a moment to hold the curl before returning to the beginning position.
5. Good Mornings
The way a good morning works is just like an RDL, but you carry the bar rather than bringing it up from the floor.
The same guidelines for the RDL apply when you're carrying a barbell on your back: maintain a flat back and a slight bend in your knees as you tilt forward. Your hamstrings need to feel just a little stretched.
6. Single-Leg Romanian Deadlifts
Single-leg exercises not only work the hamstrings but also improve balance and stability.
Single-leg Romanian deadlifts engage the hamstrings and other hip stabilisers, promoting functional strength and reducing muscle imbalances.
7. Kettlebell Swings
Kettlebell swings are a great exercise for increasing the size of your hamstrings, as well as strengthening them.
Swinging a kettlebell is a fantastic way to load the hamstrings since it causes more rapid hip extension. HIIT training is an excellent approach to strengthen your hamstrings.
Don't sit back into the movement; instead, keep your back flat and hinge forward. Unexpectedly, this study discovered that kettlebell swings were one of the best hamstring exercises for engaging the biceps femoris.
Useful Tips for Hamstring Training
Warm up adequately before engaging in hamstring exercises to increase blood flow and reduce the risk of injury.
Maintain low reps and high sets. There is little benefit to training the hamstrings with a lot of repetitions because they are mostly rapid twitch.
In order to generate enough stress to trigger a hypertrophy or strength response, you must work out with substantial resistance.
One intense hamstring workout each week should be sufficient. Volume, or the total number of reps you perform each week, is an important component of your hamstring workout.
Are there any exercises you would add to this list? We’d love to hear your suggestions!
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