Tweetwhat all do you do for your hamstrings

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Originally Posted by deepsouth

SLD's and leg curls, unfortunately my legs are extremely strong but refuse to gain size at the rate that would make me happy. I have moved legs to twice a week to see if there is any change

You ever do supersets or drop sets? I found that both work great with legs when used wisely. For example, a leg extension/squat superset. That SS is awesome and it will make you call on muscles you didn't even know you had. The extensions will wear out the primary quad heads and so when you get under that squat bar (as fast as you can) you start calling on all kids of other muscles in the thighs. Also, I think it causes you to fire way more areas of each muscle head.

Give those a try one day and let me know how you feel the next day.

As for hams, the SS works but I found that in a couple clients (I used to train a long time ago) that leg curl drop sets and/or negatives worked great. With the drop sets I would take them up to a weight that allowed about 5 or 6 clean reps and then I would drop it 15 to 20% and let them max out and drop again. Typcially, three drops was the goal and we did anywhere from two to three sets. But, we never did these back to back, more like every third or fourth workout. The supersets are a stiff leg/curl SS. This is done differently that the quad one because you start with the compound. I don't know why, but for some reason this was always produced better results with the compound first. (I found the same thing to be true with pec SS).

Then, my more modern day favorite....tempo training. I pick a tempo like 4121. That means I work the negative for four seconds, hold the 'stretch' for one full second (this means no rest so on bench you don't bring the bar all the way down), then work the positive for two full seconds (this allows you to actually 'feel' the muscle contract through the ROM) and then a full second squeeze. Depending on what I'm going for in a given day, I may only do say 8 reps. With each rep being 8 seconds long, I will have a time under tension of approximately 64 seconds. The next time you do an eight rep set I want you to time yourself and see what your time under tension is. The typical eight rep set is usually somewhere in the 8 to 10 second range, that's it! So, I get 54 more seconds of tension on the muscle. This technique will require to reduce weight, but the body really doesn't understand resistance as well as it understands time under tension. You can use this with just about every exercise. I like to mix it up too, sometimes I will hold the squeeze for a full two seconds. You want to talk about rushing blood to a muscle, that creates a great pump.