Instructions

  1. Kneel on a pad with your feet anchored under a secure object (the bottom of a squat rack, a partner’s hands, the edge of a treadmill, or a dedicated Nordic curl bench).
  2. Keep your body in a straight line from your knees to your shoulders, brace your core, and squeeze your glutes.
  3. Lower your torso toward the floor in a controlled manner, resisting the whole way down with your hamstrings.
  4. When you can no longer control the movement, place your hands on the floor to take just enough weight off your hamstrings to allow you to lower your chest to the floor (like a push-up).
  5. Push off the floor to raise your torso, then use your hamstrings and glutes to continue raising your torso and return to the starting position.

Expert Tips

  • Kneel on something soft. A yoga mat is ideal, but a folded towel works too.
  • Keep your glutes, hamstrings, and back muscles engaged throughout each rep, and keep your torso in line with your thighs. This keeps tension on your glutes and hamstrings.
  • Since it can be hard to complete a full repetition of this exercise without using your hands, you can hold the part of each rep that feels most difficult for five seconds before lowering your torso to the floor.
  • If you have a tendency to bend at the waist, think about lowering your hips to the floor rather than your chest.
  • To do Nordic hamstring curls at home, wedge your feet under a couch or bed frame.

Mike’s Take

The Nordic hamstring curl is one of the only bodyweight hamstring exercises worth doing.

The reality is that the hamstrings are a hard muscle to train with your body weight alone—more or less all of the best exercises involve using a machine (leg curl) barbell (Romanian deadlift, good morning), or dumbbells (dumbbell RDL).

You can try to replicate these exercises at home without the proper equipment, but it’s impractical. The Nordic hamstring curl is one of the few bodyweight exercises that allows you to train your hamstrings with high levels of tension, through a meaningful range of motion, without any special equipment.

All of that said, here’s why I almost never program the Nordic hamstring curl over other hamstring exercises:

  1. The exercise has an extremely uneven resistance curve—it’s easy at the top of each rep but becomes exceptionally difficult as you lower yourself to the floor. This isn’t ideal for gaining muscle or strength, because it means your hamstrings are only being trained with high levels of tension for a relatively small portion of each rep.
  2. It’s impossible to know how much your arms are really assisting. For example, if you get 8 reps instead of 6, is that because your hamstrings are stronger, or because you used your arms a bit more to help? It’s impossible to know for sure.
  3. Finally, like all bodyweight exercises, it’s difficult to add weight in small increments to this exercise. You can hold a weight to your chest or wear a backpack, but that quickly becomes impractical (and you’ll still probably need your hands free to assist at the bottom of each rep).

Thus, it’s best to think of the Nordic hamstring curl as a good hamstring exercise if you can’t train with machines, barbells, or dumbbells, but it’s still suboptimal.

If you’re going to do the Nordic hamstring curl, I’d recommend you do it for 2–3 sets of as many reps as you can get with 1–2 minutes rest. Once you can do at least ~10–15 reps without using your hands to assist you, it’s time to switch to a more challenging exercise (ideally a machine, barbell, or dumbbell hamstring exercise).

Nordic Hamstring Curl Alternatives

  • Seated Leg Curl. My favorite hamstring isolation exercise. This allows you to train close to failure and through a full range of motion, to isolate your hamstrings effectively, and add weight in small increments.
  • Lying Leg Curl. Another excellent option that you can think of as more or less interchangeable with the seated leg curl.
  • Barbell Romanian Deadlift. The best barbell hamstring exercise there is. It trains hip extension rather than knee flexion, so it complements the Nordic curl rather than replacing it.
  • Dumbbell Romanian Deadlift. The same hip hinge with dumbbells—handy at home or when the barbell is taken.
  • Barbell Good Morning. Another hip hinge, and a good option when your grip or lower back is the thing limiting your RDLs.
  • Glute-Ham Raise (GHD Machine). This is a decent alternative, but it doesn’t have any meaningful advantages over the leg curl, is harder to progress, and more awkward to perform.

Nordic Hamstring Curl Workout

Here’s a sample workout that shows how to program the Nordic hamstring curl into your training:

Bodyweight Squat: 3 sets | 10–15 reps | 1–2 min rest
Nordic Hamstring Curl: 3 sets | 10–15 reps | 1–2 min rest
Push-up: 3 sets | 10–15 reps | 1–2 min rest
Bodyweight Row: 3 sets | 10–15 reps | 1–2 min rest

Muscles Worked by the Nordic Hamstring Curl

Hamstring anatomy: the biceps femoris, semitendinosus, and semimembranosus

The hamstrings are made up of three muscles: the semimembranosus, semitendinosus, and biceps femoris (which has two heads, a long one and a short one).1 The Nordic hamstring curl trains all three as well as the glutes and lower back to a lesser degree.

More Hamstring Exercises

Scientific References +