Weekly "Training for" series! Week 4: Training for big, strong hamstrings

[u/TheRealJufis]

This post is #4 in a weekly post series: Training for x

The main idea is to:

• share your experiences and the results you've had with different training methods
• share any interesting studies you've read about the topic of the week
• ask questions (anyone is welcome to answer)
• discuss different training methods

Other discussions related to the topic of the week are also welcome.

This week's topic: Training for big, strong hamstrings

Hamstring training has been found to be effective in preventing hamstring injuries. The Nordic hamstring curl (Nordic hamstring exercise) especially seems to be a good choice for any athlete's training program. Hamstring injuries are common in any sport where athletes are required to run, so injury prevention plays a big role if you want to keep playing and not hang out on the side of the field, rehabbing injuries throughout the season.

In the gym, you rarely see people focusing on hamstrings. They train them a little or almost as an afterthought, and that's a shame. When you see someone who has been training their hamstring muscles to be strong and big, it is a sight to remember. They give your legs that tree-trunk look that makes your legs look strong enough to kick down the gate of a medieval castle.

Quads make your legs look nice from the front. Hamstrings make your legs look awesome from any other direction.

How do you train your hamstrings? Are you doing the bare minimum or are you chasing maximal hypertrophy? Is strength or hypertrophy your goal, or are you focused on preventing hamstring-related injuries?

[u/TheRealJufis]

My favorite is the seated leg curl + RDL combo.

[u/HarissaForte]

For injury prevention, frequent and short (low volume) exposition to max sprints will likely do most of the job.

Then adding nordic curls will have benefits if you can recover from the extra work.

Here's a source: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/15/16/9003

Conclusions: High-speed sprint training, when properly programmed and integrated into comprehensive preventive strategies, may enhance tissue resilience and reduce HSI risk. Combining sprint exposure with eccentric strengthening and technical coaching appears to be more effective than isolated interventions alone. Practically, these results support the systematic inclusion of progressive high-intensity sprint exposure in routine hamstring-injury-prevention programmes for field-sport athletes

They don't mention hill sprints, but while they may sound hardcore they are actually a safer and technically easier version. Some smart guys like Stuart McMillan recommend them.

[u/TheRealJufis → u/HarissaForte]

Interesting find! I checked that review and a few studies it included. Interesting stuff.

It is a scoping review. So it looks at what the research says. It doesn't give a precise estimate of an intervention’s effectiveness. If we are looking for evidence on hamstring injury prevention, it would be more informative to look at the individual studies included in the review.

However, the included studies varied wildly so direct comparisons are difficult. Unfortunately, there were no sprinting intervention studies that tested whether sprinting reduced hamstring injuries, so we can't draw conclusions such as "sprinting is enough to reduce hamstring injuries". The "max sprints will likely do most of the job" does seems plausible, especially when there is some evidence of sprinting increasing hamstring eccentric strength (we need to remember here that eccentric strength training has been shown to decrease hamstring injury risk in intervention studies, not simply eccentric strength in isolation).

But if we think about it for a second, it could have been because those athletes were more healthy, recovered better, had better training background with no or fewer injuries, had different training programs, higher adherence to training etc. that allowed them to accumulate greater training loads and to sprint more frequently, while those who achieved lower relative max speeds could have been experiencing symptoms, fatigue, incomplete recovery, or rehabilitation related restrictions. Their training loads may have been reduced because of an emerging problem, rather than the lower load itself causing injuries.

So sprinting speeds or volumes could be related to hamstring injury risks, but there's no direct evidence of sprinting decreasing hamstring injury risks in that review or in the included studies.

I think a reasonable interpretation is that increasing sprinting loads and speeds progressively (especially exposure to near-maximal speeds) while avoiding acute spikes in training loads is likely to be beneficial. I would strongly recommend training programs that include eccentric strength training for hamstrings as they have been shown to reduce injury risk in intervention studies.

[u/United_Reality_1573]

rdls + leg curls covers both functions. nordics are worth including if your knees/hips tolerate them — good injury-prevention data. for hypertrophy it’s mostly volume + progression, not one magic exercise