Nordic Hamstring Curl

What the Nordic hamstring curl actually trains

A Nordic hamstring curl is a bodyweight knee flexion exercise in which you kneel with your ankles anchored and lower your torso towards the floor under control, keeping the hips straight throughout.

The hamstrings do the work, resisting knee extension as gravity tries to straighten your legs out from under you. Bourne and colleagues found that exercise selection changes which hamstring muscles are loaded, with knee dominant exercises like this one biasing semitendinosus strongly and hip dominant exercises biasing biceps femoris long head, which means a Nordic does not cover the whole group on its own.

What makes the exercise distinctive is that it is essentially an eccentric exercise. You lower, you cannot get back up under your own power for a long time, and the concentric half is mostly done by pushing off the floor with your hands. Roig and colleagues found eccentric training produced greater strength gains than concentric training, and Schoenfeld and colleagues found eccentric actions at least match concentric ones for hypertrophy. This exercise is a very direct way to apply that.

It also has a genuine reputation in sport, where eccentric hamstring training is widely used as part of hamstring strain risk reduction programmes. That reputation is well earned and worth taking seriously, but be careful how much you load onto it. No exercise prevents injuries on its own, and it works alongside sprint exposure, load management and everything else in a training week.

Setting up and executing

Kneel on a pad with your ankles anchored, under a loaded barbell, a Nordic bench, a partner's hands or a strap on a rack upright.

Set your knees roughly hip width apart. Squeeze the glutes so there is a straight line from your knees through your hips to your shoulders.

Hold your arms across your chest or out in front of you.

Begin lowering forward from the knees, resisting from the very first degree. The exercise is not about how low you get, it is about how much you fight the whole way.

When you can no longer hold the position, catch yourself on your hands.

Push off the floor with the minimum force needed to restart the rise, then pull yourself back to upright with the hamstrings.

The mistakes that cost you the most

Bending at the hips is the fault that quietly makes the exercise easy. Folding at the waist shortens the lever between your knees and your centre of mass, so the hamstrings have far less to hold. It looks like a good rep from the side and it is not one. Glutes squeezed, hips straight.

Free falling then catching is the other way of avoiding the work. If you drop through the first forty degrees and only start resisting near the floor, you have skipped the range where you were strongest and most of the useful tension. Pallares and colleagues found full range training beat partial range work, and the top of the descent is the part that gets skipped here.

Starting with no regression is the most common practical error. Almost nobody controls a full Nordic on their first attempt, and trying anyway means one rep and a week of soreness.

Too much volume too soon follows from the same enthusiasm. This exercise produces severe delayed onset soreness in the untrained, and two or three sets is a genuine session.

And anchoring the ankles badly is the one that hurts. If your feet slip in the middle of a rep, nothing stops your descent.

Sets, reps and rest by goal

Low reps, low volume, low frequency. This is not a high volume exercise and treating it like one goes badly.

For muscle gain, three sets of four to eight with two minutes rest. For strength, three sets of three to six with three minutes. In a fat loss phase, two sets of five to eight with ninety seconds.

Start below that. One or two sets of three assisted reps in your first week is sensible, and build across a month.

Progression runs through assistance rather than load. Begin with a band anchored in front of you or a partner's hand on your chest, then reduce the help, then remove it, then slow the descent, and only then add a plate held to the chest.

Refalo and colleagues found stopping a rep or two short of failure produces comparable growth to going all the way, which matters here because failure on a Nordic means collapsing. Stop when the descent stops being controlled.

Schoenfeld and colleagues found a dose response between weekly hard sets and hypertrophy, but Nordics are not where you should chase that number. Get your hamstring volume from curls and hinges and use this for the eccentric quality it uniquely provides. Once a week is enough for most people.

Where it fits in your split

Late in a lower body session, once a week.

On push, pull and legs it goes on legs day after the main lifts. On a bro split it comes near the end of hamstring or leg day. On an upper and lower split, use it in one lower session, not both. On a full body programme it is a strong option with the volume kept low. On a bodyweight programme it is the hardest hamstring exercise available.

Do not put it before squatting or sprinting. The soreness and the acute strength loss after a hard eccentric session are real, and they will spoil the next two days of training if you time it badly.

Pair it with a hip extension movement rather than treating it as complete hamstring training. Bourne and colleagues' finding that knee and hip dominant exercises bias different muscles is the reason: a Romanian deadlift and a Nordic together cover more of the group than either does alone.

Variations worth knowing

The band assisted Nordic anchors a band in front of you at chest height, which takes the most weight off exactly where the exercise is hardest, and is the standard entry point.

A partner assisted Nordic works the same way with a hand on the chest, with the advantage that the help can be adjusted mid rep.

The razor curl allows the hips to flex, which shortens the lever deliberately and lowers the demand, provided you know you are doing it on purpose.

A sliding leg curl, lying on your back with your heels on sliders, trains eccentric knee flexion far more gently and is the better starting point for most beginners.

The glute-ham raise supports the hips on a bench, which makes the same movement more scalable and less punishing.

And the weighted Nordic, holding a plate to the chest, is where you go once you can control bodyweight descents throughout the range.

What the evidence says

Bourne and colleagues examined hamstring activation across exercises and found knee dominant movements such as the Nordic curl bias semitendinosus while hip dominant movements bias biceps femoris long head, which is why this exercise pairs with a hinge rather than replacing one.

Roig and colleagues reviewed eccentric versus concentric training and found greater strength gains from eccentric work, which is the mechanistic case for an exercise built almost entirely around the lowering phase.

Schoenfeld and colleagues compared concentric and eccentric actions for hypertrophy and found eccentric work at least as effective, supporting the same conclusion for size.

Maeo and colleagues found greater hamstring hypertrophy after training at long muscle lengths, which is a useful caution here: the Nordic keeps the hip extended, so the hamstrings are relatively short, and a seated curl covers the long length work better.

Pallares and colleagues found full range training beat partial range training, supporting resisting from the very top of the descent rather than only near the floor.

Schoenfeld and colleagues on weekly volume and Refalo and colleagues on proximity to failure supply the programming, and the failure point here is the moment control is lost rather than the moment you hit the floor.

Common questions

I cannot control the descent at all. Where do I start?

That is normal and expected. Start with a band anchored in front of you at chest height, or a partner's hand on your chest, and use as much help as you need to lower slowly. Sliding leg curls on your back are a good alternative entry point. Work through those for four to six weeks before attempting an unassisted rep.

Does this actually prevent hamstring injuries?

Eccentric hamstring training is a well established part of injury risk reduction programmes in sport and the evidence culture behind it is genuinely strong. But it is one component among several, it works alongside sprint exposure and sensible load management, and no single exercise prevents injury on its own.

Why am I so sore afterwards?

Because the exercise is almost entirely eccentric, and eccentric work under high tension produces more muscle damage and delayed onset soreness than concentric work. The soreness reduces sharply after a few weeks of consistent exposure.

Is a glute-ham raise the same thing?

They overlap heavily and both train knee flexion with your bodyweight. The difference is that a glute-ham raise supports the hips on a pad and lets you add hip extension, which makes it easier to scale and easier to complete concentrically. If your gym has the bench, the glute-ham raise is the more programmable exercise and the Nordic is the harder one.

Do I still need leg curls if I do Nordics?

Yes, and mostly for a boring reason: the Nordic keeps your hips extended, so the hamstrings are working at relatively short lengths, and the evidence favours training them long. A seated curl covers that and adds loadable progression. Nordics for eccentric quality, seated curls for volume and length.