

Written by Pete Rubish

If you’re anything like me, you’ve gone a significant period of time neglecting to train your hamstrings. The hamstrings aren’t a flashy muscle group, they excite almost no one, and they can be one of the more painful muscle groups to train. No one comes up to you and comments on your hamstrings, nor do we ever have many opportunities to show them off. Not to mention how they often tighten up in the days after you train them and this leads to night cramps.

So at this point you’re probably thinking to yourself, “isn’t this article supposed to make me want to train them?” We’ll get to that, but first off I’d like to tell you that most of us simply neglect them out of pure laziness. With the exception of calves, I can’t think of a more “boring” muscle group to train. Often times, we get it in our head that deadlifts and squats hit them and that’s good enough. I’m here to tell you it’s not. If you’re not doing the following exercises I’m about to mention, then I can bet with almost 100% certainty that you’re not performing up to your full potential on deadlifts and squats.

So what can we do to make sure our hamstrings are as powerful as possible? The first step is to begin doing glute-ham raises with either bands or chains. This exercise is hands down the best accessory movement for deadlifts in my opinion. Others may argue there’s something better, but in my experience if you want to get a ridiculously fast deadlift and never have trouble locking the weight out, you better be doing these. You start by either draping chains around your neck or tying a band under the machine and then looping it over your neck. Either method will produce drastic results. I prioritize speed on this movement. At no point do I want to be doing the concentric portion of the movement slowly. For best results, lower yourself slowly, and explode up. Do these twice a week, four sets each day and watch your lockout troubles disappear and your bar speed go through the roof.