Your hamstrings are worked by any exercise that involves bending your knee against resistance, extending your hip, or both. The most effective options include Romanian deadlifts, Nordic curls, seated leg curls, hip thrusts, and sprinting. But not all hamstring exercises are equal, and the position your body is in during the movement changes which parts of the muscle get trained and how much growth you stimulate.
Three Muscles, Three Jobs
The hamstrings aren’t a single muscle. They’re a group of three running down the back of your thigh: the biceps femoris on the outer side, the semimembranosus on the inner side, and the semitendinosus between them. All three bend your knee and extend your hip, but they also rotate the hip and lower leg when the knee is bent. This means no single exercise hits every hamstring muscle equally, and a complete routine needs movements in more than one position.
Hip Extension Exercises
Hip extension movements are anything where you hinge at the hip and drive it forward against load. Romanian deadlifts, stiff-leg deadlifts, good mornings, and hip thrusts all fall into this category. These exercises load the hamstrings in a stretched position, which is valuable for both growth and injury resilience. They also train the glutes heavily, making them efficient for overall posterior chain development.
Romanian deadlifts deserve special mention because they keep tension on the hamstrings throughout the entire range of motion and allow progressive overload with significant weight over time. If you only picked one hamstring exercise, a hip hinge variation would be the strongest choice.
Knee Flexion Exercises
Leg curls isolate the hamstrings by bending the knee against resistance, and the version you choose matters more than most people realize. A study comparing seated and prone leg curls over 12 weeks found that the seated version produced 14% growth in overall hamstring volume, compared to 9% for the prone version. The difference comes down to muscle length: when you’re seated with hips flexed, the hamstrings start in a more stretched position, and training muscles at longer lengths appears to drive greater hypertrophy in the biarticular (two-joint) hamstring muscles.
If your gym has both machines, the seated leg curl is the better default. Prone curls still work, but the seated position gives you a measurable edge for muscle growth.
The Nordic Hamstring Curl
The Nordic curl is one of the most studied hamstring exercises in sports science, and for good reason. You kneel on the ground with your ankles locked under a pad or held by a partner, then slowly lower your body forward, resisting gravity with your hamstrings. It’s brutally difficult and enormously effective.
A systematic review of over 8,400 athletes found that programs including Nordic curls reduced hamstring injuries by 51%. The exercise produces some of the highest muscle activation levels recorded for the hamstrings. One systematic review found that a Nordic curl variation with the ankles flexed activated the biceps femoris long head at 128% of its maximum voluntary contraction, and the standard version averaged about 76%. For comparison, lunges only activated the biceps femoris at around 20%.
Nordics also improve flexibility. A six-week study found that performing Nordic curls increased hamstring range of motion by about 6 degrees, which was statistically identical to the gains from a dedicated static stretching program. So if you dislike stretching, eccentric hamstring work can cover some of that ground for you.
Sprinting
Maximal sprinting produces the highest hamstring activation of any activity tested. In EMG comparisons, sprinting generated greater muscle activity in the semitendinosus and biceps femoris than every gym-based hamstring exercise in the study. This makes sense: the hamstrings work hardest during the late swing phase of sprinting, when they’re decelerating the lower leg at high speed while simultaneously lengthening.
Sprinting also trains the hamstrings at velocities that no weight room exercise replicates. Since most hamstring injuries occur during high-speed activities like sprinting and cutting, training at those speeds builds sport-specific resilience that slow, heavy lifts alone may not provide. If you play a sport involving running, incorporating progressive sprint work is one of the best things you can do for your hamstrings. Start conservatively and build intensity over several weeks.
How to Structure Your Training
For muscle growth, research suggests that roughly 10 sets per muscle group per week is the threshold where hypertrophy gains start to be maximized. For hamstrings specifically, splitting that volume across at least two sessions per week produces better results than cramming it into one. A practical approach might look like 5 to 6 sets of a hip hinge movement on one day and 4 to 5 sets of leg curls (preferably seated) on another.
Hitting the hamstrings from both the hip and the knee is important because the muscles respond differently depending on which joint is doing the work. Hip-dominant exercises like Romanian deadlifts load the hamstrings near their full stretch, while knee-dominant exercises like leg curls target the muscles through a different portion of their length. Combining both covers the full mechanical picture.
Adding Nordic curls once or twice a week, even at low volume (2 to 3 sets of 4 to 6 reps), provides substantial injury protection and targets eccentric strength that other exercises may miss. Consistency matters here: one study found that after stopping Nordic curls for just 14 days, the structural adaptations in the muscle (specifically fascicle length) had already begun reversing significantly. Maintaining at least one session per week appears to be the minimum to preserve those benefits.
Exercises Ranked by Effectiveness
- Highest activation: Sprinting, Nordic curls, and isokinetic (machine-based) exercises consistently produce the greatest hamstring muscle activation, often exceeding 70% of maximum voluntary contraction.
- Best for growth: Seated leg curls outperform prone leg curls for hypertrophy. Romanian deadlifts and other hip hinges allow heavy progressive overload at long muscle lengths.
- Best for injury prevention: Nordic curls cut hamstring injury rates roughly in half across multiple sports and competition levels.
- Lowest activation: Lunges, while useful for quads and glutes, produce the lowest recorded hamstring activation of any category studied, averaging under 20% of maximum.
One Mistake That Undermines Results
Static stretching before hamstring-intensive training can temporarily reduce strength output. Research shows that pre-exercise stretching, particularly PNF-style stretching, can impair explosive performance by around 5% for up to 15 minutes afterward. If you want to stretch, do it after your session or on separate days. A dynamic warm-up or light sets of the exercise itself are better preparation.
The other common pitfall is simply stopping. Hamstring training adaptations fade quickly when you drop the habit. Compliance of greater than 50% to a structured exercise plan significantly reduces injury risk, while detraining erases structural gains in as little as two weeks. The best hamstring program is the one you actually keep doing.