1 Exercise That Will Bulletproof Your Hamstrings

The best way to treat a hamstring injury is to prevent it from happening. Once they happen, they become a real b**ch to rehabilitate. The best way to prevent injury is to make the muscle as strong as possible but adequately loading the hamstrings can be cumbersome and challenging if you don’t have regular access to a gym. This is where Nordic Hamstring Curls save the day. By their nature, they’re tremendously difficult and require no equipment.

Study after study has shown the value of Nordic hamstring curls in decreasing injury to the hamstrings.

This is exercise is so good that it’s consistently been shown to decrease the incidence of hamstring and knee injuries in populations particularly vulnerable to these by half. That is a hugely significant amount!

The Nordic Hamstring Exercise/Curl

The exercise is predominantly an eccentric muscle contraction, which is where most muscle damage and overload takes place.

You will need a partner or a solid place to wedge your foot.

Set up the exercise by kneeling on both knees. Your hips and torso will be upright. Your partner is going to hold down your feet with their hands on the back of your ankles/heels. Your partner should have their shoulders over your feet to make sure enough weight is applied.

Initiate the exercise by slowly lowering yourself to the floor by using your hamstrings. Try to approach the floor as slowly as possible. You will use your hands like a push up to absorb the impact at the floor. You can return to the starting position by either resetting the exercise or doing an explosive push up to hamstring curl your way back up.

Perform 3-5 sets of 5-10 repetitions.

Conclusions

Taking clues from weightlifting and sports medicine, they best way to make a muscle resilient and resistant to injury is to make it as strong as you can and train it with the greatest amount of tension as possible. Then you replicate game time scenarios with various drills.

The studies that showed the value of Nordic hamstring curls used the exercise in isolation with no other exercise program, but of course including the Nordic hamstring curl in a fully comprehensive program is the most optimal approach. However, if you for some reason had to choose just one exercise to do, this is it.