How To Strengthen Hamstrings

If you want to strengthen your hamstrings, there's lot of options available to you. The best exercise you could ever do, though, is a Romanian dead lift, which I'm going to show you now. You're going to stand over a bar, bending over.

The legs stay quite straight. They don't need to be locked, they can have a little bend, that' fine, and you're slowly standing up while breathing out. Then going down, then standing up and breathing out.

Now, this may look quite easy, but it takes a while to get used to. There's a few important kind of teaching points for you to know. First of all, the movement is slow.

Once you get advanced, you can do it very quickly which is great. But if you're a beginner to this, very slow. The reason I'm saying this is because when you work the hamstrings, you're also working your lower back.

When you're working your lower back, you don't want to make any mistakes. Otherwise, you're going to get injured, and it's dangerous. Next, apart from the speed, the technique.

Now, starting off, I'm tilting my pelvis, so I'm sticking my bum out. This switches on my lower back muscles, which is protecting my spine, and very slowly, I'm tilting from the hips. I'm not bending the knees.

Tilting from the hips, grab the bar and I push all my weight down through my heels, and push my hips forward. Look at my hips, again. Now, also, if you look at my back, I'm trying to keep it flat.

This is really bad for you. If you've got heavy weight, you want to straighten up. The way I'm straightening up is by tilting my pelvis and also pinching my shoulder blades together, so my back is completely flat.

Now, look again. Flat back, pushing my hips forward. Flat back, pushing my hips forward.

Now, if you're a beginner, start off with quite a light weight, maybe about a third of what you weigh. If you weigh sixty kilos, start off with twenty kilos, and then build up. You should, after a few months of training, be able to build up to around about your own body weight.

So, if you weigh eighty kilos, you'd probably do eighty kilos. However, it's best to get instruction at a gym, because it's quite technical exercise. And that's some tips on how to build up your hamstrings. .