Whether your health objectives are performance-related or extra about the way you look in a pair of denims, prepare to fulfill your new favourite energy transfer: hamstring curls.
Located south of your glutes, your hamstrings are a robust (but typically missed) muscle group that helps bend your knees, lengthen (straighten) your hips, and rotate your legs. The hamstrings come into play throughout purposeful actions, like strolling and climbing stairs, and could be strengthened with compound actions, just like the squat and deadlift.
But incorporating hamstring workouts into your resistance coaching can amplify your outcomes and supply extra focused advantages associated to lower-body energy and energy, harm prevention, and aesthetics (learn: a shapelier butt).
Below are six totally different hamstring curl variations you are able to do with no machine, starting from beginner-friendly banded leg curls to a extra superior body weight hamstring curl.
To carry out every isolation train appropriately, you’ll want entry to an train mat, resistance band, dumbbell, stability ball, bench or chair, and gliders.
1. Standing Hamstring Curl
Difficulty stage: simple to average
This standing, single-leg hamstring curl could be carried out as a body weight train or with a resistance band looped round your ankles.
- Stand together with your ft hip-width aside. Place your fingers in your hips or maintain onto a secure floor, just like the again of a chair or a wall, for steadiness.
- Shift your weight to your proper leg and, conserving your left foot flexed, slowly draw your left heel towards your butt.
- Once you’ve gone so far as you may go, pause for a second. Slowly decrease your left foot to the bottom.
- Repeat for the desired variety of repetitions, then swap legs.
2. Seated Hamstring Curl
Difficulty stage: simple to average
To carry out seated hamstring curls, anchor a resistance band to a pole, weight rack, or heavy fixture at about ankle top. Arrange your chair or bench so that you simply’re dealing with the anchor level.
- Sit on the bench and lengthen your proper leg so there’s a mushy bend in your knee. Loop the open finish of the resistance band across the again of your proper ankle. (Alternatively, you may place the band round each ankles to work each legs on the identical time.) There needs to be a average quantity of rigidity on the band. This is your beginning place.
- Keeping your chest up and your shoulders again, slowly draw your proper heel again towards the bench so far as you may. Pause for a second.
- Slowly lengthen your leg to return to the beginning place.
- Repeat for the desired variety of reps, then swap legs.
3. Glider Hamstring Curl
Difficulty stage: simple to average
The glider hamstring curl takes the already difficult glute bridge and dials it up a notch. If you don’t have gliders, attempt substituting paper plates or carrying slippery socks on laborious flooring.
- Lie in your again together with your arms at your sides, knees bent 90 levels, and left heel resting on a glider.
- Engage your core and raise your hips so your physique kinds a straight line out of your shoulders to your knees. This is your beginning place.
- With management, slowly lengthen your left leg by sliding the glider away out of your hips.
- Go so far as you may whereas nonetheless sustaining management and conserving your hips lifted. Then, use your hamstrings and glutes to slip the glider again towards your hips.
- Return to the beginning place and repeat for the desired variety of reps earlier than switching sides.
4. Lying Hamstring Curl
Difficulty stage: average to difficult
When carried out with a dumbbell between your ft, the mendacity hamstring curl — also called the susceptible hamstring curl — engages the hamstring muscular tissues in each legs. You may also anchor one finish of a resistance band to a pole, weight rack, or heavy fixture at about ankle top and slip the opposite finish of the band round one or each ankles.
- Lie face down together with your legs collectively and your brow resting in your fingers. If you’re utilizing a dumbbell, place the deal with between your ft. If you’re utilizing a resistance band, be sure you’re dealing with away from the anchor level and loop the open finish across the backs of each ankles. (If you’d want to work one leg at a time, loop it round one ankle and maintain the opposite leg prolonged on the ground.)
- Engage your core and, conserving your ft flexed, slowly draw your heels towards your butt. Continue to maintain your thighs pressed towards the bottom.
- Once you’ve gone so far as you may, pause, then slowly decrease your ft again towards the bottom.
- Repeat for the desired variety of reps. (If you go for the single-leg mendacity hamstring curl, full each repetition on one leg earlier than switching sides.)
5. Stability Ball Hamstring Curl
Difficulty stage: average to difficult
By introducing a component of instability, the Swiss ball hamstring curl exams your steadiness and fires up your core muscular tissues whereas additionally constructing energy in your hamstrings.
- Lie face up together with your again on the bottom, legs prolonged, and calves resting on the soundness ball. Open your arms to a “T” place to assist steadiness.
- Engage your core, contract your glutes, and press the backs of your legs into the ball to raise your butt off the bottom till your physique kinds a straight line out of your shoulders to your ankles. This is the beginning place.
- With your ft flexed, slowly draw your heels towards your butt, permitting the ball to roll towards you and beneath your ft.
- Pause, then slowly lengthen your legs, rolling the ball away from you, to return to the beginning place.
- Repeat, conserving your hips lifted, for the desired variety of reps.
6. Nordic Hamstring Curl
Difficulty stage: difficult
If you’re on the lookout for a problem, give the Nordic hamstring curl a shot. Performed from a kneeling place, this superior motion requires sufficient hamstring energy to each decrease and raise your torso with management.
- Start in a tall kneeling place. (Place a rolled-up towel or pad beneath your knees for consolation.) Anchor your ft by slipping your heels beneath a heavy weight rack or piece of furnishings, or ask a associate to carry your ft in place.
- Keeping your core engaged, slowly lean ahead at your knees and decrease your torso to the ground. Use your glutes and hamstrings to manage your descent.
- Once you’re a number of inches from the ground, permit your fingers to catch the load of your physique towards the bottom. Immediately draw your self again as much as a tall kneeling place utilizing your hamstrings and glutes. If obligatory, use your fingers to help you.
- Repeat for the desired variety of reps.
Hamstring Curls: Benefits
Your hamstring muscular tissues play a vital position in flexing your knees and lengthening and rotating your hips. You want them for on a regular basis actions like strolling, operating, squatting, climbing stairs, and bending over.
Adding hamstring curls to your exercise might help you preserve wholesome purposeful motion patterns by strengthening these muscular tissues, however that’s not their solely profit. Here are a number of extra causes to think about incorporating leg curls into your strength-training routine.
Versatility
There’s a hamstring curl choice for each stage of capacity and expertise (simply have a look at the above record of choices), and you may simply make every variation more durable or simpler by adjusting the resistance.
Strength and energy
The hamstring muscular tissues include a considerable amount of sort II muscle fibers, that are accountable for rapidly producing massive quantities of pressure. So, whether or not you play a sport or simply need to climb stairs sooner, hamstring curls might help you develop extra lower-body energy.
Injury prevention
Research reveals that usually performing the hamstring curl — the Nordic hamstring curl, particularly, which applies load to the hamstrings as they’re lengthened — could scale back the speed of sports-related hamstring accidents by as much as 51 p.c.
Addresses imbalances
As visible creatures, we are inclined to deal with the “mirror muscles,” or the physique elements we will see, and overlook in regards to the muscular tissues that make up the posterior chain. This can create problematic muscle imbalances that may result in motion compensations and harm.
Exercises that strengthen the muscular tissues that run alongside the bottom of the physique, just like the hamstring curl, might help restore and/or preserve steadiness.
A shapely rear
It’s not all in regards to the legs. Well-defined hamstrings might help intensify your butt, making it look tighter and extra lifted. Hamstring curls can set off hypertrophy, or muscle development, which is accountable for a extra shapely booty.
Hamstring Curls: Muscles Worked
While some leg curl variations like the soundness ball hamstring curl and the glider hamstring curl interact the glutes and deep core muscular tissues, all hamstring curl workouts primarily goal the hamstrings, a bunch of muscular tissues situated on the backs of your thighs.
The anatomy of the hamstrings, which originate on the pelvis and insert into the knee simply above the calve, is comprised of three separate muscular tissues.
Biceps femoris
Comprised of each an extended head and a brief head, the biceps femoris is the outermost hamstring muscle and is accountable for flexion of the knee, extending the thigh on the hip, rotating the decrease leg when the knee is barely bent, and rotating the thigh when the hip is prolonged.
Semimembranosus
The innermost hamstring, the semimembranosus additionally features to flex the knee, lengthen the thigh on the hip, and help in each thigh and lower-leg rotation.
Semitendinosus
The semitendinosus, which is situated between the biceps femoris and the semimembranosus, has primarily the identical features because the semimembranosus.