I found that one legged speed hops with a slight knee bend (leg almost straight with minimal movement around the knee with active arm drive) with an emphasis on …speed improves power in the hamstrings. Ham curls (Yes people are against it) where the concentric is done with two legs fast and the eccentric is done with one leg is also very effective. Doing ham curls with a PAUSE in between each rep of about 4-5 secs also aids the improvement of power and intra muscular co-ordination, a weight of 60% seems to be very effective. Recovery between the sets must be long this ensures that there is NO fatigue between the sets. If done rythmically without intra rep pauses then you develop strength endurance or power endurance not power. I found that by doing the reps this way each effort is as powerful as the first and recruitment and co-ordination of the hams improve. Bounds with an emphasis on a flick to the butt with the heel as the foot leaves the ground helps. The bound should be done with an emphasis on being light on your feet rather than trying to power out of each movement.
martn76,
what reps/sets would you use for the hamstring curls and what other hamstring exercises are you doing during this time in terms of weights? Thanks!
We do a multitude of ham work to improve co-ordination. We also do CF’s exercises along with standing ham curl type exercises with a weighted boot from time to time with an emphasis on using the hip and knee together. We also do cable hip extensions now and again. Deadlifts both heavy and light. It seems that the hams do best when you train them using different weight intensities from 40%-80% and exercises. In particular, the ham curl we do is modified. We allow the hip joint to be active by pressing the knee into the bench as the weight is lifted this makes the exercise more of a multi-joint routine allowing the hams to act on both the hip and knee joint. It TAKES a very long time to see the benefits in intra muscular co-ordination about 2 months. Sets usually consist of 8-10 reps, because of the pauses between reps there is NO muscle soreness or fatigue after ham work BUT strength goes up. Sets of 3-4 are usually done. We do not restrict ourselves solely to just 60% int. We use a wide range of intensities. The one leg hops, speed bounds and other drills are also part of the mix. We do not train the hams in a prescribed manner, its rather more organic, depending on how the athlete feels…
Your thorough post is much appreciated!
Have you found any soreness problems with this multi-exercise approach? Or the fact that you use them almost “randomly” (without sticking to a particular one for too long) does not cause any such problems over time? Thanks!
Although I haven’t tried anything similar in a systematic way, your approach to this particular muscle group is appealing. Others?
The muscle soreness occurs when the majority of the reps are rythnical-serial as opposed to each rep deing seperated by a pause.
No GHR = Glute Ham Raise exercises using a GHR machine?
Yes we do that also
tahnsk guys it was for a presentation at uni… i had to do… alll done now and went well… but dont know mark…
if i recall correctly they were well trained
one theory was that sacroplasmic hypertrophy is overestimated and that in athletes who have good nervous systems just adding muscle is enough because their nervous systems are already excellent at firing the muscle…
interesting, being wrong on my part is always a possibility and yes increases in muscle mass correspond with increases in strength. my problem is i think people go about it improperly. they train for hypertrophy when in fact if the simply train their CNS in the same manner you would program a computer your bodies mucularity would take on the proportions necessary with the highest amount of effeciency.
Recruiting a very high percentage of motor units in the legs is very difficult in my opinion.
It is much easier with the upperbody.
If we were to find an exercise that could recruit 90% or so of the hams, adductors or quads motor units we would be on to something special.
Then, it would be worth doing 1 to 3 rep sets, becuase that’s the max reps you’d feel like doing with a truely intense exercise.
I’ve only ever had that feeling once or twice during an exercise I can no longer do…
Incline single leg DEEP barbell squats (don’t laugh ) Ass to calves.
My foot would be on a sturdy inclined bench so that I could go all the way down without keeping other leg high and so not cramping it’s hip-flexor.
I would do 1 rep sets. 2 warm up sets and then the main set for 1 rep. That’s 3 total reps per leg of the exercise and I would do the exercise 6 days a weak. Becuase it was a much lighter weight than a double leg squat weight, I was not fatigue-ing the nervous system and could do the exercise everyday, and still feel invigorated and fresh as a daisy.
By doing the exercise everyday, I managed to build strong technique and was able to phsyche myself for a truely quantum effort, for I knew it would be just one rep and then finished. Toward the end of the 3 weak cycle, one of the reps felt like I was densitizing my muscle into a black hole, with tremendous tension through entire leg/hips and all support muscles.
My assistance exercise was the floor glute-ham raise, for no prescribed rep range other than what reps I’d feel like.
After 3 weaks of steady improvement, I went to the gym to test my 2 footed barbell squat and had smashed my 5 rep pb by 35 kg.
I also set a 60m sprint pb in the same month, despite less running work than usuall.
HOWEVER
I can no longer do incline single leg DEEP ass to ankles barbell back squats with even a half decent weight, my right leg’s hamstring will just shutdown at bottom of rep and let go if I attempt the exercise with even 25 % of the weight I used to lift. Besides it is a bit of an awkward movement and the limb lengths v spine length, and angle you have to bend forward can stat to get risky and potentially cumbersome or hazardous.
(Charles Polaquin has mentioned about how learning an un-natural muscle movement pattern, can eventually cuase the muscle to shutdown completely in that exercise after your neurological system has done the exercise so many times.) This has been my experiance.
Secondly, Becuase of the incredible tension I felt in the exercise a few times, I won’t go back to doing standard lifts that don’t make me feel like I’m challenging the true potential power of the muscle.
Romanian dead’s come close to challenging my hammies as do floor glute-hams with knees on padded thin block. Romanian dead’s I don’t bother with, becuase I would reach technique perfection (intra or inter co-ordination?), within 6 sessions and then what? Risk lower back in an allmighty 1 rep set of Romanian dead’s? No thanx.
Niether do I bother with even floor glute-hams becuase I feel some soreness in lower hammie tendons next day If I push the exercise which sais something about where the stresses are dealt with. Plus I don’t want hamstring improvement to be much greater than glute improvement, as that can mess with sprinting apparently.
And becuase NO other exersise can generate the tension I would like to feel, even those two are not THAT good compared to the 1 rep incline single leg DEEP barbell squat- ass to calves), I don’t see the point in any lower body weight training at all.
If you could generate massive tension in, above 90% leg motor units, it would be worth DOING the 1- 3 rep sets for what you would want to achieve from them in the first place. Here lies the problem of lower body strength training for a lot of sprinters.
Even 1 rep sets in bog-standard lifts (Barbell squats, lunges, cleans,) don’t heavily challenge the peripheral nervous system of the legs.
However, If you are talking about 1 ep sets for CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM STIMULATION more so than PERIPHERAL STIMULATION, for me THAT tangent is better manipulated on the track than in the gym in any case.
See my above post.
Sorry to peeps for my post being a bit long.