You can shift more work to your hamstrings on the leg press by placing your feet high on the platform, using a wider stance, and pressing through your heels. No single adjustment turns the leg press into a hamstring-dominant exercise the way a leg curl would, but combining several tweaks meaningfully increases how hard your hamstrings work during each rep.
Why the Leg Press Is Quad-Dominant by Default
The leg press is primarily a knee extension exercise. You push a load away from your body by straightening your knees, and that motion is driven by your quadriceps. Your hamstrings assist by helping extend the hip, but they play a secondary role in the standard setup. EMG studies consistently show the highest activation in the inner and outer quad muscles during leg presses, with the glutes and hamstrings trailing behind regardless of stance width or foot angle.
That doesn’t mean foot placement is irrelevant. It means you’re working within a range: you can nudge the balance from “mostly quads” toward “more hamstrings and glutes,” but you won’t flip the exercise entirely. Think of these adjustments as turning a dial, not flipping a switch.
Place Your Feet High on the Platform
This is the single most effective change you can make. Positioning your feet near the top edge of the foot plate increases the range of motion at your hips while reducing how far your knees travel forward. Since your hamstrings cross the hip joint and help extend it, a deeper hip hinge under load recruits them more. A low foot position does the opposite: it increases knee travel and shifts the demand almost entirely onto your quads.
Aim to place your feet so that your heels sit in the upper third of the platform. Your toes may be near or slightly above the top edge, depending on the machine. You should feel a stronger stretch in the back of your thighs at the bottom of each rep compared to a mid-platform position. If you don’t, slide your feet a little higher.
Use a Wide, Heel-Driven Stance
A shoulder-width or slightly wider stance opens your hips and allows a deeper range of motion at the bottom of the press. That extra depth means more hip flexion, which loads the hamstrings and glutes through a longer stretch. A narrow stance, by contrast, limits hip range and keeps the quads doing most of the work.
Where you direct force through your foot matters too. Consciously pressing through your heels rather than the balls of your feet cues greater hip extension. Some lifters find it helpful to slightly lift their toes inside their shoes as a mental reminder, though you don’t need to literally curl them up. The goal is simply to avoid pushing from the forefoot, which tends to emphasize the quads and calves.
Control the Eccentric and Go Deep
Lowering the sled slowly (the eccentric phase) keeps your hamstrings under tension longer. A two to three second descent is a good target. Let the platform come down until your thighs approach your torso and your knees reach roughly 90 degrees or slightly beyond. Cutting the rep short at a shallow angle reduces hip flexion and removes the hamstrings from the equation early.
There’s a practical limit here. Going so deep that your lower back rounds off the pad shifts stress to your lumbar spine rather than your hamstrings. If your hips start to tuck under at the bottom, you’ve gone too far. Back off slightly and use that as your working depth.
Choose the Right Machine
If your gym has both a 45-degree (angled) leg press and a horizontal leg press, the 45-degree version is the better choice for hamstring emphasis. The angled setup allows a greater range of motion and naturally incorporates more glute and hamstring work because you’re pressing upward against gravity at a steeper angle. Horizontal leg presses limit how deep you can go and tend to keep the stimulus concentrated on the quads.
Some gyms also carry pendulum-style or plate-loaded lever leg presses. The same principles apply to any of them: prioritize machines that let you achieve a deep hip angle at the bottom of each rep.
What About Foot Rotation?
Turning your feet inward or outward on the platform is a common suggestion, but the evidence is more nuanced than most gym advice implies. Research on foot rotation and hamstring activation found that internal rotation (toes pointed slightly inward) increased activity in the medial hamstrings (the inner portion, closer to your knee), while external rotation (toes pointed out) shifted activity toward the lateral hamstrings (the outer portion, the biceps femoris). However, these effects were measured during leg curl exercises, not leg presses. During exercises that don’t involve direct knee flexion against resistance, such as bridges and Nordic curls, foot rotation had no significant effect on hamstring activation.
The leg press falls somewhere between these categories. It involves knee flexion, but not in the same loaded way a leg curl does. Rotating your feet slightly inward is unlikely to hurt and may offer a small bias toward the inner hamstrings, but it shouldn’t be your primary strategy. High foot placement and a full range of motion will make a bigger difference than foot angle alone.
Putting It All Together
For a hamstring-focused leg press set, combine these cues: feet high on the platform in a shoulder-width or wider stance, weight driven through your heels, a slow and controlled descent to a deep (but spine-safe) bottom position, and a deliberate press back up. Use a moderate load that lets you maintain this form for all your reps. Heavy weight with a short range of motion will default back to quad dominance no matter where your feet are.
Even with all of these adjustments, the leg press will never isolate your hamstrings the way a lying leg curl, Romanian deadlift, or Nordic curl can. It’s best thought of as a compound movement where you’re biasing the hamstrings rather than targeting them exclusively. If hamstring development is a real priority, pair a high-foot leg press with a dedicated hamstring exercise in the same workout rather than relying on the leg press alone.