Nordic curls: one of the best hamstring builders there is

You kneel on a pad with your ankles held down, by a partner, a loaded barbell, or a dedicated pad or strap. Keeping your body in a straight line from your knees to your head, you lower yourself forward toward the floor as slowly as you can. Your hamstrings are the only thing resisting the fall. When you can no longer hold it, you let your hands catch you, then push off the floor to help yourself back up to the start.

The key word is eccentric. An eccentric contraction is a muscle producing force while it lengthens, which is what your hamstrings do as your body tips forward and the distance between your hip and knee grows. Muscles are far stronger eccentrically than they are concentrically, which is why you can lower into a Nordic long before you can pull yourself back up from the bottom without help.

Hamstring strains are one of the most common and stubbornly recurrent injuries in running and sprinting sports. They tend to happen at the end of the swing phase of a sprint, when the hamstring is long and contracting hard to slow the leg down, an eccentric action under stretch. That is precisely the situation the Nordic curl trains.

A systematic review and meta-analysis pooled results from 15 studies covering 8,459 athletes across different sports, ages, and both sexes. Injury prevention programmes that included the Nordic hamstring exercise cut the overall rate of hamstring injuries by roughly half compared with programmes that did not. For an exercise you can do on a gym floor with no machine, that is an unusually strong and consistent result.

Alongside injury protection, the Nordic curl reliably increases eccentric hamstring strength and lengthens the muscle fibres of the biceps femoris, the long head of the hamstring most often injured. Longer fibres and more eccentric strength are both thought to make the muscle more resilient when it is stretched hard at speed.

Here is the honest part: the first time most people try a Nordic curl, they drop like a plank the moment they pass a shallow angle. That is not weakness or failure, it is the norm. The exercise is so demanding that you build toward a full controlled rep over weeks, not in one session. Rushing it just buys you a week of crippling soreness.

1. Anchor your ankles securely. Kneel on something soft. Have a partner hold your ankles, wedge them under a heavy loaded barbell, or use a Nordic pad or strap. If your ankles slip, nothing else works, so make this solid first.
2. Start with assisted eccentrics. Loop a resistance band around your chest and anchor it in front and above you. The band takes some of your weight, letting you control a bigger range. Use a thicker band to start and step down to thinner bands as you get stronger.
3. Control what you can, catch the rest. Lower as slowly as you can for as far as you can, then let your hands catch you and push gently off the floor. Even a short controlled range trains the hamstring. The goal is to slow the fall, not to survive the whole rep.
4. Extend the range over weeks. Each session, aim to control a little more of the descent before your hands take over. Progress is measured in how far down you can resist smoothly, not in how many reps you grind.
5. Reach the full unassisted rep. Eventually you lower all the way to near the floor under control, catch lightly, and push back up. That full range, controlled Nordic is the target. It can take months. That is completely normal.

The Nordic curl is a textbook case of a little going a long way. Because it is heavily eccentric, it causes strong delayed onset muscle soreness, the deep ache that peaks a day or two after training. New trainees who do too much are often sore for the best part of a week. The fix is to start almost absurdly light and let your body adapt.

Once or twice a week is plenty. This is not an exercise you need to do every day, and doing so mostly buys you soreness rather than results. Put it early in a session while you are fresh, since fatigue wrecks your control and control is the whole point. Pair it with a hip hinge like the Romanian deadlift or the cable pull through, which trains the hamstrings and glutes in a different way, and you cover the muscle well.

The most important cue across all of these is to stay rigid from your knees to your head, hips fully extended, and let the hamstrings do the braking. The moment you break at the hips, you turn it into a different, easier movement and lose the point. Slow, straight, and controlled beats fast, folded, and many reps every time.