Hamstring Training | ETP#157

Part five of our series of episodes named the “Design Series.” So far we have covered the Upper Back and Lats, Shoulders, Quads, and Chest. In today’s episode we are covering the Hamstrings. Bryan comprehensively walks us through how to best approach intelligent program design for effectively training the hamstrings based on three equipment availability tiers.

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Life/episode updates
21:18 - Introducing your hamstrings
26:24 - Commercial gym training
42:24 - Your options on a garage gym/CrossFit gym
56:30 - Training on dumbbell/bands-only program

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Transcript

0:29

What's up, guys? Happy Tuesday for everyone listening on the podcast platforms. Happy Monday for everyone who catches us on YouTube. Welcome to episode one hundred fifty seven of Eat, Train, Prosper. Today we are talking hamstring training. So it's been a bit since we have covered a an exercise group in our training series, but we are back covering the final few. Today is hamstrings, which we are going to get into here in the next few minutes. But first, as always, Brian, can you kick us off with some updates, please? Yeah, let's start with the big news. So last week I hinted that I had had a DEXA done and that I was waiting on the results. The results came in like an hour after we recorded last week. So I've been sitting on these results for a week now. And the really unfortunate thing is that the results are wrong. They just are. I am disappointed as well. So the results showed that I lost 12 .5 pounds of muscle since last year. and that I gained 11 pounds of body fat. And so they're just wrong. I've been kind of ruminating on this in my head, and I've talked to Dave McHoney and Abel and some other people around the industry. And I've taken measurements. I have my strength numbers. My strength is the same minus maybe a little bit of loss on some pressing movements. Like back and leg stuff is all all the same arm stuff's the same. Measurements are all the same. Nothing's changed. I see my physique every day and it doesn't look different either. So ultimately they're wrong and I'm just disappointed that a I paid a bunch of money for wrong information and be that that I just I can't take anything away from it. If it had been you know, you lost two pounds of muscle, I would have been like, Yeah, you know, maybe that's possible because I've been biking a lot. I'm lifting less like, you know, that makes sense, whatever. But honestly, like, I, I don't see a difference in myself in my performance in the gym and the way I look, and anything like that. And so for it to come out and say 12 .5, it's like, such useless information that it is just sad. I'm just a little I'm depressed about it because I also don't feel now that I can go back and get dexes in the future with any reliability. That can I interject a little bit if you don't mind? Did you say anything to the company? No, I didn't. I asked a bunch of questions about the tech who is doing the thing because so I've had two Dexos prior to this and they were a year apart and they were almost identical. The one a year later, the second one showed that I gained 0 .8 pounds of muscle from the first one. It was right after my one arm training experiment and... so I, I felt like that was in line and close enough that it seemed realistic and I bought it, to see this one come through and be so different than the prior two. I asked them some questions there. So the person running the, the actual DEXA scan for me was different than the person that did it the first two times. the radiologist interpreting the data is apparently a different radiologist than the one that did it the first two times. after I inquired about. And so that's, it's the same machine. That's the one thing that is consistent. And they say that that's the most important part is using the same machine. But to have a different tech running it and a different radiologist interpreting it, I think that that must have been part of what contributed to, to the error. And the other thing I was going to say is it also, so in those numbers, the loss of mass and the increase of body fat, it had me at 21 and a half percent body fat. which is with a six pack abs, I'm sitting there hanging out at 21 and a half percent. So yeah, any other thoughts on that? and I'm quite frustrated. If I were you, right? And I think that is that is and when you as you were speaking about it in my mind, I was thinking it's like, okay, if it's like a three to four pound difference or like Delta, like that could potentially be believable, you know, over the cross. But when you said 12, like 12 and a half, it's insulting. It's insultingly inaccurate. You know what I mean? I would reach out to them and be like, listen, I've used you in the past, you know, with this most recent test, like I will not come back because I'm wasting my money and I'm wasting my fucking time. You know what I mean? Like it's so off. And what would be actually really great for us to do is to maybe reach out and see if we can get someone on the podcast who has worked as a Dex tech. There was one time I believe Jackson has calibrated them as part of his studies at one point. And he said how much of like a massive pain in the ass. It wasn't it was like a daily thing. They had to be calibrated daily. But maybe we bring someone on because it's something that I think even at like our level of understanding in the industry, we don't really know what goes into it. And I think while it may still be considered the like gold standard, there is still a high degree of discrepancy, which obviously you're experiencing here with these numbers. Yeah. So I went down the Google train a little bit and it said that for, especially with people with high levels of muscle mass, the error rate can be up to as high as 10% in studies that they've done. And so I don't think that that's 10%. Like, I don't know what that 10 % refers to. Like, is that 10 % of my total body weight? So it could be like, you're 200 pounds and it shows you it, you know, is that 10 % body fat or is that 10 %? lean muscle mass or like what does that 10% refer to? I don't really know. But like my body fat percentage went up. five and a half or 6%. And,% is just, it's visually inaccurate. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, I just know what my body looks like. And even if I did add, like, a little bit of fat here and there, I didn't add 11 pounds of fat. And I definitely didn't lose 12 and 1 half pounds of muscle. So yeah, that is interesting. We should, A, bring somebody on. So if anyone has any recommendations listening and you have a Dexatech person that you want to bring on, suggest them to us. And, I may end up reaching out to them. I have been contemplating it and how I would phrase it and stuff like that. And so, yeah, I think you kind of have the right approach there with, you know, I'm just so disappointed that I can't use this information. I now won't be coming back to this one, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't know what I expect to get out of it, but at least to, you know, pass that. Yeah, definitely. Okay, anything more positive than that do you have? All right. So second update is my wife just got back from four days away. She was on a girls trip. And so I was solo dadding. And then in three days, we're actually leaving together for a trip to Vail with some of our friends from East Coast and West Coast. We're all meeting in Colorado and heading up to Vail for a weekend away. I haven't seen these guys in a while and they've been friends of ours for decades at this point. Jana, actually you, you may know Jana from, from San Diego. She was friends with Kim lived with her. They were roommates. She lives in Boston now and has kids the same age as mine. So anyway, the kids are staying at home. So we have a, we have this coming up, which should be fun this coming weekend, but it just continues to kind of pile on this training paradigm that now I'm following almost as a result of how busy I've been this, this year. where I've mentioned it on prior podcast episodes that I seem to be getting like four, maybe five hard training days a week across both cardio and lifting. And then I have like two or three days where I just, I can't really do either and I'm just off. And it's been thus far in two months of prioritizing cardio, this has actually been super productive for me. And it just makes me kind of rethink recovery. And especially with the fact that it seems like volume being the main driver of cardiovascular adaptations, it's even more of a confident correlation than it is for hypertrophy, which I think there's some holes in the story for cardio. I think it's pretty straightforward. And so I always approached cardio as if like, hey, the more I can do the better. And if I'm beat up, I'll just do some zone one, zone two, but just being on the bike and doing cardio is better than not doing cardio. And taking these days off each weekend, has really made me realize how much better I perform the Monday after taking a few days off. And so I think I'm rethinking recovery and its importance and maybe its impact on adaptations as well. So that's been interesting. Like this weekend, I didn't get to do cardio Friday, Saturday or Sunday. I was able to lift. That's the thing I always complain about. And you'll realize this when you're a parent is that. when the spouse leaves you with the kids, you can still lift if you have a home gym. Great, you know you have a home gym. If you don't have a home gym, you probably can't lift either. But the thing you can't do is get outside and have any personal time outside. It's like, if you want to go for a walk, your kids are too young, you can't leave them home alone. So, okay, you guys want to go scoot? Okay, I'll walk alongside you. But then it's completely stressful because they're crossing streets and they're not listening to you and there's cars and it's not like a relaxing chill walk. I definitely can't get any bike rides in or anything like that. And so it's, it's these weird, it's, it's just, it's an odd thing to be a solo parent. And you're dealing with literally the inability to have any personal time outside, which is just something that maybe only parents can really understand the agony at this point. So my final update here is just, I just wanted to briefly touch on the new CAF study that just came out and then also, And I'm not gonna go into details on this. Basically the calf study was the first one that had you perform partials after failure. And this is something that I've been big on for the last few years in my training. And I've talked to Milo and been like, dude, we need studies on this. And he was like, yeah, I'm working on one right now. And so they did, they now have this preprint out that basically showed more growth in the calves when you go to failure plus doing partials versus just going to failure. I think there's definitely some holes in this study in that, could it be that the result was just the result of extra volume? So you both groups went to failure and then one group did partials after maybe they just did more volume. Maybe if you had done an extra set of calf raises that would have offset the partials that you did at the end, maybe there should have been a control group that went to failure and then did short range partials versus the group that went to failure and then did long range partials. So there's a number of kind of different arms I would have personally loved to see. And then also the study is being reported as this really dramatic effect of, I think it was, I don't know what the percentage change was between doing the partials and not doing the partials, but it sounded much bigger. I want to say it was like 80 % or something like that. But if you actually look at the raw data, it was like 0 .05 centimeters, which is like, it's just. It's really small. So it's within the error of measurement. So like you could have actually just gotten that through improper measuring. So I thought that was interesting. We can touch on that more as the paper goes from pre -print to full print maybe. Along the same lines, there was another study done by the same group, or at least Milo was part of it, where they did leg extensions and they either did them sitting straight up or they did them leaning back. and they found 170 % more growth from leaning back in the leg extension, which would stretch the rec fem a little bit more pre stretch the quad. Again, I don't know how the actual effect size was like, is that 170 % again, just like, they gained one centimeter of mass, I didn't delve into the paper deep enough to really see that. But 170 % obviously sounds like a huge number like, it's over two times the amount of growth that you got by not leaning back. And then the third thing to touch on this similar topic is everything going around the industry now with trying to differentiate between stretch mediated, mediated hypertrophy and lengthened exposure or whatever. And I think this all started because Paul and Chris Beardsley were like, none of this is stretch mediated hypertrophy. These are gains are not happening because stretch mediated hypertrophy is only when you're stretching a muscle. at a long muscle length and it's being stretched, it's not being worked dynamically. And then length and partial people are like, well, length and partials don't need to be stretched mediated hypertrophy because the point is not that you're stretching the muscle to extreme lengths under load, it's that you're spending more time in the length and range of motion doing dynamic contractions. And so there's all of this kind of... pedantic stuff going on in the industry right now. And I am both like kind of annoyed by seeing all of it and how much importance people are placing on it, but also kind of semi intrigued in following it. So that's really all I got. I'm not going to delve super into it here into the updates or whatever. But I thought it's interesting to kind of relay that information to anybody listening that maybe isn't deep enough in to see all that that stuff that I just pedantic is such a great term to use there. The word that came to my mind was semantics, but pedantic is a much better term. But it's like, they're, they're arguing over the proper terminology of what is happening. As it but I think we can all agree, for maybe 70 % of us can agree that like, spending more time, like you said, under dynamic, you know, load at a longer muscle length is positively correlated. regardless of what the proper terminology for it is. Right, exactly, agreed. Okay, cool. I'll run through my check -ins rather quickly, or not check -ins, my updates rather quickly. So as some of you know from from Instagram, Jenny and I are in Bangkok, Thailand for a medical procedure for Jenny. We're freezing her eggs and ended up spending a lot longer time here than originally planned. So I thought I would be here for a about a week. I got here last Wednesday, it's now Tuesday and I will be here for at least two more weeks. So the hard thing is Jenny had to start to procedure stuff on the second day of her cycle. But obviously like, you know, probably most women on the pod listening to podcast and like, it may not be the same day, you know, every month and there's different things that impact it travel being one of the largest things that impact a cycle. So she got here early. And then her cycle was like seven days late. or something like that. So she'll spend up like almost like a month here, I think actually by the time everything's done. And we just have a lot more time, which is, it's both cool and a pain in the ass. Obviously I don't have as much clothes and then there's shit going on back home and in different things like that. But I'm fortunate that work can just come with me, right? As everyone sees I'm in a different room and environment. So I do feel very, very grateful there. And then now that we are in the city, I have had a drastic increase in daily activity just from steps. The gym is about a 20 minute walk. And that has required dietary intervention. And that is if I go nowhere else besides just the gym and back. If we're walking to like a mall or going shopping or anything like I'm doing 15, 20,000 steps per day, not great for the end of my like, you know, peak build. So I've had to add an extra meal in which I really, really don't want at all. But it's what's been required to keep my body weight like ticking up. So now I'm by far eating the most food I have ever eaten in my life. And I'm not enjoying it to be completely transparent. I'm not enjoying it at all. I'm over it. Well. I think that happens to you every time though that you get into the end peak stages of your, your bulking phase. Yeah, except this year it's literally a thousand calories more than last year. well you also weigh more too. I mean you have more muscle at least. Yeah. yeah. But I mean, it's it's it's staggering now. I need to be eating every pretty much two and two hours, two and a half hours to make it all. Or I have to stay up till like midnight to get it all in. Like I had to do the one night, which was miserable. All right, so that's the kind of negative part. The gym here is really, really cool. I'm training at a gym called BPC Thailand, Benhanced Performance Center. Ben Broughton, who's an IFBB pro out of Singapore, owns it here. It's a very, very cool gym. It's all Max Pump and Gymleco kit, which is very, very cool. And it's just a very good environment and vibe. And they have a lot of Gymleco kit. So what's been cool is I got to test. I've been able to test a lot of the equipment that I bought for Undefeated. And so far, I only missed the right call once. guys. I passed on the Jim Leco pendulum squat because it doesn't have a counterbalance. And in my experiences, which I've had a few, the pendulums without a counterbalance are absolute dog shit. Not the Jim Leco one. It is very, very nice. It's like I was I used it the other day and I was I was baffled by how nice the the resistance curve was and. I mean, it's just good. You can load it up well too. It's really smooth. It's not like brutal in the bottom like the Watson one is that doesn't have a counterbalance. And I was like, damn it, you know, I fucked up. Like we definitely should have bought this. We still have a pendulum. We just got it from somewhere else with a counterbalance, but I was. quite surprised at that. So kudos to Jim Leco for somehow figuring that build out, but it is a very, very good pendulum. I'm looking at it right now online. I just I just googled it as you were talking. Yeah, it looks great. I mean, it is it is interesting that there isn't a counterbalance. But that's cool that it's still it still works. I mean, it looks it looks really solid. I I have a counterbalance option on mine. So it's like a it's an extra arm there you can add the counterbalance if you want to but you don't have to. And I actually generally use it without the counterbalance. It's definitely heavier at the bottom, but I think that's kind of what you would expect without the counterbalance. So what do you find with that one? Is it also like quite hard at the bottom, but just smooth so it's okay? Or? no it deloads into the bottom and then it picks up like a little bit. Yeah, it's it's very, very good. banding it a little bit. Yeah. really interesting is I found I was able to load it nearly identical to how I load the Arsenal pendulum that has the big counterbalance on it. Like within like 10 kilos. Arsenal one? Are you up to three plates? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause I find the arsenal one really heavy. Like I remember when I did it at Armbrust in Denver, it was, I want to say my top set was three plates, but then I had to back off to like two and a half plates for the, for the back offset for, I don't know, whatever rep range I was using eight to 10, something like that. Yeah, I have it in my current program. I'm at four or sorry, not four, three, three plates. No, not four, three plates. And that is what I do the like the integrated partials with. And I got like eight, eight reps with the integrated partials. So like 16 lengthened exposures on it. Yeah. strong. Yeah, very cool. So is that and then the last thing the the hospital we're using here is called boom rune grad and it's Amazing like it is a very very well oiled machine. It's smooth They have translators for like a bunch of different languages you sit down with the doctor. They explain things like it's just a stark contrast to my experiences in hospitals and it was very, very impressive, to be completely honest. So we'll be going back a few more times. I'm actually going to go on Thursday to get some fertility testing of my own done to pretty much see how how shut down I am. But I'm kind of just excited to go back. They have a full Starbucks inside, like multiple, multiple meal places and stuff like it's just pretty fucking cool to be completely honest. So I'm excited to just go back and walk around and look at shit and stuff. But. It's been a cool experience and I think we're pretty pumped about the decision we made on the location and stuff. Nice, love that. Post up and do your laptop work in the hospital, man. Yeah, I can. All right, so you want to jump into the topic today? All right, so we're talking about hamstrings and like we've done in the past, we're going to break it down into commercial gym, garage gym or home gym, CF gym type setup or dumbbell and bands only kind of to represent the three different types of programs we have at Paragon. So that's how I think about this stuff in those three kind of categories or buckets. Hamstrings are... I guess I'll say we'll spend most of our time on commercial gym because that's where we expect most people are but hamstrings are somewhat of a simple muscle group in the sense that you have hip flexion or hip extension and knee flexion. So you actually wrote down a third category you wrote down unilateral knee flexion. So that would be single leg, leg curls or whatever which still fit into the category of knee flexion but it's certainly a different variation. By that token, I guess you could also put like single leg RDLs into the mix too. But they all have value for sure. But the nice thing about the hamstrings is that they really are trained fully by two movement patterns. So you have one where you hip extend, meaning that your legs are straight and you're bending at the waist. And then you have one where you knee flex. And so your knees are bending, your heels are coming towards your butt and your torso is remaining mostly stable. And then there's kind of that hybrid one that you brought up in the notes, which would be like your GHR or a Nordic or something like that, where you are. It's kind of like a hybrid of both your hip extending and you're also knee flexing simultaneously, and that movement is is a crusher. I mean, it the amount of soreness that you get, it's what's called an eccentric loaded movement. So the benefit to the movement is almost entirely in controlling. your descent down. And yes, there is stimulus in the ascent. But a lot of people that aren't even strong enough to do the ascent will just control their way down and then kind of like push themselves back up using their upper body. And there's still significant benefit in the movement there too. But as far as soreness goes across hamstring movements, like RDLs are certainly up there, but GHRs are probably even more damaging than the RDL is. for the fact that it is so eccentrically loaded there. Any thoughts from you kind of on just basic intro to hamstrings before we get into the details? No, I mean, you covered it perfectly. And I just wanted to include the the G .H.R. as it is this kind of like unique unicorn exercise. It does a little bit of both at the same time sort of thing. You don't really see it programmed too much into hypertrophy programs though. I feel like it's more of a athletic prehab movement for like, yeah, you know, hamstring tears and sprinters and things along those lines. How about, how about you? Have you seen it programmed into hypertrophy too much? the hard thing is a lot of gyms just don't have have the piece of equipment. You know, like I mean, many do not. And I think it's it's hard to like when when I see. So one of the things that I'll typically do with a lot of new clients that I will be doing training for, as I say, hey, send me a walkthrough video of you walking around the gym with either a video or take pictures of, you know, pretty much every angle so I could see all the equipment in the gym. If people have it. I'll program it like I really like that movement. I think it has a pretty good carryover into just like body awareness, body control, you know, using synergistic systems, you know, like through the core and different things like that. But yeah, I would say the limitation is many, many gyms just don't have one. Yeah, I mean, so that would be like a GHD. Like you could do your GHRs on a GHD. You could also like what most people do if gyms don't have a GHD is they will put a barbell down on the ground super low or a Smith machine works. You load up a Smith machine and put it on the ground and then you kind of wedge your feet behind the barbell underneath it. And that's how I used to do them. When Brian Miner coached me back in 2020, he had me doing a bunch of those. And that's exactly how I did it. Heavy barbell on the ground with a little pad underneath so that my knees weren't digging into like the hard horse stall mats and then doing them that way. So, no, I love them. I think they're great. There's a video of Tyreke Hill for anybody that is interested. There's a video of Tyreke Hill, the wide receiver for, I guess, the Dolphins now, but he was on the Chiefs then. Basically doing a set of 10 of those without... using his hands to push back up. So he would descend down and like hover above the ground, like six inches above the ground, and then ascend back up. And he had a set of 10 and watching him do like the last two or three reps and maintaining his torso position. Because that's the first thing that breaks. If you're doing that movement, you go down and you begin to come back up your torso kind of breaks from your hip line. And he just maintained this perfectly static is just really impressive, like Google Tyree kill doing GHRs or Nordics or whatever. as in YouTube, but it's worth checking out. Okay, so in a commercial gym, because we know that training the hamstrings requires hip extension and knee flexion, basically two movements, there's a number of ways we can kind of go about doing this. When we talk about my preferred way of pairing these up, I love having an RDL and a lying leg curl paired together or a 45 degree or GHD hip extension combined with a seated leg curl. And that's because the RDL is a lengthened biased movement, whereas the lying leg curl is a short biased movement. Flip the script when we go to 45 degree hip extension, that's a short biased movement now on the hip extension portion, but going to seated leg curl where we get a bit more of the lengthened exposure through the longer muscle length there. So both of those pairings to me work incredibly well. And anytime that I design a program for clients with two leg days in it or two hamstring days, it's always going to have one day with RDL and lying leg curl and one day with 45 degree and seated leg curl, assuming that the client has access to all of those different equipment pieces. What are your kind of basic thoughts on that? I mean, I don't think there is a better way that you can do it. Like if like Brian just put together a very concise and very, very targeted explanation of how to program for hamstrings really well right there. Alright sweet, let's go home. That's it. That's all we need. We're done. Yeah. So those are like really the basic movements and we can we can expand out a little bit and be like, okay, RDL. Well, there's a ton of different RDL variations that you can do. From basic versions, you have barbell, dumbbell, trap bar, or even the new variation sweeping the internet that I've been programming for a number of years is the cable RDL. And the cable RDL is have you done cable RDL before? I have, I find that they kind of require a few different things to be in your favor with the gym. Yeah, so the issue that I've experienced is that once you become strong, the way the cables are set up is that they're pulling you forward. And so that's part of the benefit of the cable is it's like, great, it's pulling you forward. It's allowing you to really focus on that disparity between where your butt goes back and your torso is bending forward. So you're able to get an extremely long range of motion through the hamstrings. But part of... the drawback of the cable pulling you forward is that your feet are feeling like they need to slide forward the entire time as you begin to ascend up. So it's very, the stability is not great. To have a perfect cable RDL, what you would need is you would need the cable to be coming out of the ground, like directly beneath you. So it kind of emulates the path that you would have with a barbell. However, to do that, you either can do, I guess I've seen people doing it on like a belt squat machine. squat yeah. you can do like a belt squat RDL, which kind of emulates the cable RDL thing a little bit. Or alternatively, what I've done in my home gym is I've stood on like a 12 inch riser and I've done cable RDLs because then the cable that's coming out of the ground has enough clearance room so that when you get to the bottom, you're not bottoming out the machine there. But it definitely has its limitations. However, if you're not super strong and the weight isn't really pulling you forward, I think it's an extremely effective way of getting hamstring stimulus with a much more even resistance profile. Because the thing with the free weights is that it's always going to be easy at the top and hardest at the bottom. With the cable, it's going to be much more even across the board where you feel that kind of similar stimulus throughout the entire range of motion. So those are kind of the main RDL variations. And then... from the bilateral versions, you could do all of those single leg. You can elevate your single leg. You could do a B stance where you kind of are in like a staggered or a kickstand stance. You can elevate your back leg on a bench or on a wall, or you could just have it hovering behind you. The hovering behind you way, I feel like is probably something I program more for athleticism and sport than for hypertrophy because it creates... a little bit of balance issue and your stability then goes down. It's actually quite tough to do that movement with heavy weight in your hand to literally stand on one leg with like a hundred pound dumbbell in each hand or something along those lines, but it's doable. You just kind of have to train it. How about you? What are your favorite of the RDL variations? Barbell, for sure. And then a belt squat variation. Yeah. used that? You've used that one? I've actually never gotten to try it. yeah, I've used it. And it, the hard thing is like, like, like we bitch about on this podcast a lot. All exercise equipment manufacturers are different and some, it just bottoms out so high. You need to stack like 18 inch blocks on either side to stand on, you know? But the, the rogue belt squat, I think they call it like the rhino something. That's actually a cable that comes up directly straight from the bottom. That one's wonderful. some of the other ones like different of the, of the pitch shark variations, some are better than others sort of thing, but that I really like because it's, it's smooth. and the balance component isn't nearly the same as with like a barbell, like the barbell it's, it's very, you get a very, very high systemic fatigue from a couple of sets on that. And what's actually rather ironic is my least favorite variation is the dumbbells and which is in my program right now. I find that the dumbbell requires the highest systemic fatigue cost. I mean, two sets of those, I'm on my ass. And the cost is high. And... mean, there's so much that goes into like picking the dumbbells up, strapping into them, carrying them over, doing your set, making sure that your dumbbells are even and the balance component is there that there's stability, which there kind of isn't. Yeah, I got you, man. If anytime I do the dumbbell stuff, like I pretty much save dumbbell RDLs for single leg work. Like if I'm doing a rear foot elevated RDL, I'll use dumbbells. Although I still think I would prefer that with an open trap bar if I had. I have the closed trap bar so I can't do a rear foot elevated version. Yeah, but some of those would be my orders on those. And it's purely just from the systemic cost of it versus stimulus. goat. What do you think about the trap bar? Because my personal thought on the trap bar is, I don't know why it is, but I like having the barbell scraping up along my body. And whenever I have the trap bar, it feels like I don't have the same level of control and stability that I do with a barbell. It does the I mean, I'm going to say a very captain obvious statement, but it's like the the balancing, not the balancing point. What do we call it? The. What is your center of gravity is a little bit different in that kind of messes with me, but something that I find that I don't like with the trap bar is my hands are wider than I then it feels comfortable. And I have like very broad shoulders, you know, in a and I find like my hands are just out. wide and then that makes the bracing them like my back and lats like harder and that's probably the primary reason I don't really like using. That's a really good point. I think I might've been confusing the center of gravity piece, which still is an issue, but I think it's more about where the hands are in relation to my body and how uncomfortable that feels. Yeah, totally agree. They need to make a trap bar that's much, much thinner that basically hugs your hips a little better. But then maybe that's too narrow for some people, so they err on the side of going wider. Okay, as we kind of continue in, actually, before I jump into another movement here, 45 degree hip extensions versus GHD. So they're both effective. I think in most cases, I just ask my clients what version they have, and then we program that version regardless. If you're going to get into the nitty gritty and the semantics of it, the 45 degree is going to be mid range overloaded because the point where your torso passes gravity, where you're parallel to gravity is going to be the point where the movement is hardest. And if you look at where that point is on the GHD, it's going to be at the very top. So you're extremely short overloaded when you're in a GHD, which also means that when you get to the very bottom, there isn't a lot of tension on the hamstrings at the actual lengthened position. I don't think this is a huge deal because the way that we discussed repairing this hip extension movement with a seated leg curl. I think it might be more of a concern if you're pairing lying leg curl with hip extension and you're not doing an RDL because now you basically have two short overloaded movements instead of one that's going to bias more of that length and range. So I would just say if you have the GHD hip extension, you definitely want to be pairing that with a seated leg curl or make sure that you have some form of RDL in your program as well. Yep. All right, cool. And then the other movements that I've kind of noted in the commercial gym setting are a reverse hyper, which is essentially like doing a hip extension in reverse. So your torso is supported and your legs are just raising up and down. Literally the complete opposite of the hip extension where your legs are supported and your torso is moving straight up and down. So I have reverse hyper in there. I don't know if I love reverse hyper as a hypertrophy movement. because it tends to be momentum -based. You don't get too many people performing that movement where they go to the bottom, they dead stop, and then they raise up, and then they go to the bottom and dead stop. It's more of like this pendulum arc type thing where they're swinging throughout the range of motion. And that isn't to say they couldn't do it the way that I described. It's just, you don't see that very often. Most people aren't doing that. And it's also extremely challenging that way. So the amount of load you would have to use would be really low. your thoughts on the reverse hyper. I just don't think it has good hypertrophy application. I know in powerlifting programming, it's widely used, at least it used to be with a lot of the West Side stuff, but that was mostly for lower back. I believe traction is the reason they had it in there, but I very rarely see that piece of equipment. Yeah, no, I agree as well. I actually program it occasionally into my programs, especially during strength cycles, and we'll do it leaning on a GHD machine. So instead of the GHD machine set up properly where your feet go into the little footholds, you actually hold the footholds with your hands, and then your hips are hanging off the pad. And so we'll do them sometimes that way, but not not super often, just more as variety. And then the last movement I have here for commercial gyms, is alternative leg curl options. So we could probably put your unilateral knee flexion in here as well. But what I was writing was, you know, the standing or the kneeling leg curl. And so you'll see that one a lot where you have one knee kind of on a pad and you're leaning forward and then the other leg is curling unilaterally. So you see that a lot. You can also actually do that on a leg extension machine. So for anybody that doesn't have a standing kneeling leg curl, You could find a leg extension machine and basically wedge your body. And so you're facing the pad that you would usually sit on for the leg extension. And then you can kind of use the leg extension pad to curl behind you as you're standing between the bench and the pad. And that one works out decently well. The pad tends to ride up your calf as you do it. So you lose a little bit of stimulus at the short position, which probably isn't the end of the world given that. given that it is a short overloaded movement anyway. So I would consider the standing or kneeling leg curl to be an equivalent to the lying leg curl. And that's because of hip position. So if you look at a lying leg curl, your hips are extended. You're basically lying flat. All you're doing is changing your body's angle by 90 degrees. So you're now standing straight, same position as if you were lying, doing the exact same movement. Whereas when you look at a seated leg curl, you actually start in hip flexion. So you're... seated, your hips are bent, you have that 90 degree angle between your torso and your legs. And that's why we get a little bit more of the long muscle length in the seated leg curl. Sorry, I just had a bit of a brain fart, but I had a really good question. So what happened is you were speaking and I was thinking about the question that I wanted to ask you and you may be you may have just covered it. So the difference between a standing unilateral, you know, leg legs, leg curl versus the kneeling is obviously the hip position in kneeling. You're going to be in a bit of a closed hip where the standing you're going to be open hip. Were you saying? be pretty open though. I mean, it would be like if you're in a lying leg curl that has one of those like teepee pads. So it's like you're not lying completely flat, but you're also not in hip flexion like you would be in a seated leg curl. Yeah, so it's like a medium between the two of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, agreed. in our, would you say that, my question for you is how do you think that would change the kind of overload position or the peak contraction of the hamstring, anything like that? So even in a seated leg curl, where the peak forces are are gonna depend on how the cam on the machine is built. So all we know with the seated leg curl is that you're gonna train at longer muscle length because you're starting in hip flexion. It's like the old sit and reach tests that you would do for like the presidential fitness test or whatever in school. Because you're starting in a hip flexed position where you're seated, You're just starting at a longer muscle length, but it doesn't change where the peak forces are. The strength curve, so where your muscle is strongest is still, or weakest rather, is still going to be the short position. So even if you're doing a seated leg curl, your strength curve is short. It's a short overloaded movement. Where the resistance profile is, it could be lengthened or it could be short. I mean, if you look at those prime machines, you could be doing a straight up lying leg curl, which should be a short overloaded movement. yet because you can change the cam to make it lengthened overloaded, you can make that movement hardest in the lengthened position. So all we know is that the strength curve of any knee flexion is gonna be short. And then based on the machine is gonna kind of determine where it's hardest. So to your question, I mean, if we assume all things equal, we assume a lying leg curl where you're completely flat is short overloaded, a seated leg curl is more lengthened, and then the slightly hip flexed, TP type position would be somewhere in between the two. Okay, perfect, perfect example, perfect answer. And a very good point bringing up the cam because cams are different, right? Sometimes you get the perfect, you know, half moon cam that you get a pretty even kind of resistance profile, but sometimes you don't. You have like the Nautilus cam or the Prime cams that are adjustable and who knows? You can have a whole myriad of different resistance profiles based off of what the cam you have. So good point. Anything to add to commercial gym before we move to garage home gym? No, I think we covered that very, very comprehensively. sweet. So for the garage home gym situation, some of the things are the same. And some of them are quite different. The things that are the same are going to pretty much be the RDL and the hip extension. So you can do barbell RDL, trap bar RDL, dumbbell RDL, any of the single leg RDL variations, all of those, you should be able to do totally fine at home. As far as hip extensions go, If you have a 45 degree or a GHD at your home gym or your CrossFit gym, and you would assume that every CrossFit gym has GHD machines because they're a ubiquitous movement in CrossFit programming to do sit-ups on them, which is not their intention, which is just kind of ironic. But basically at any home gym or CF gym, you should be able to do some form of hip extension. It is... very likely that you have a home gym where you may not have a 45 degree or a GHD. And so at Paragon, in my programs that we run, we have created a number of at home hip extension alternatives for people. The two main ones that we use are, well, I guess the main one, the best one, I think is hips over barbell. So essentially what you'll do is you'll set a barbell up in a squat rack at upper thigh. height or maybe even slightly lower because your body angle is going to change. And so you'll set the barbell height up, you know, call it mid thigh. You'll walk your feet back and then you'll kind of wedge your body at a 45 degree angle into the barbell and you'll be able to do hip extensions that way, bending your torso over the barbell and back up. As you get stronger, you're going to find that you need to wedge your feet under something. And so I really like to put like big dumbbells. behind my feet and then kind of wedge my heels under the dumbbell. And that allows me to have a lot more stability as I'm ascending up with load. But that's certainly the easiest and most accessible hip extension variation for home. Another one that we use and people have used with success is to set up a barbell and a squat rack that's maybe at the similar height, but you're basically gonna put a box wedged up next to the barbell and then you're gonna lay across the box. and wedge your feet under the barbell as if almost as if you would for like a Nordic, except your body is elevated because you're on a box. And then you make sure the box is touching your upper thighs, that it doesn't close off your hip crease. And then you can kind of do hip extensions over the side of the box with your feet secured underneath the barbell in your squat rack. So those two options work quite well if you need to do hip extensions at home and you don't have either one of those machines. Have you had the opportunity to try those? Do you program those for your clients at all? No, it's pretty rare that I get home gym clients. But I haven't done that one. Mostly we'll just do like an RDL there, if we're doing an RDL version. Yeah. And then, so the other thing that's really different between commercial gym and home or CF gym is going to be the leg curls. And this is probably the biggest challenge that I have programming is trying to get people to do leg curls at home in a progressive manner, because you can do them. All of these options I'm gonna throw at you, you can do them all. The problem is just like, what do you do once you can do 15 or 20 reps of them? How do you make them harder? And so I do have one variation that I've been able to really get people to add load and make harder. So I'll just quickly kind of run over some of these variations. We have banded leg curls. You can do these lying or you can do them seated. If you do them seated, you're going to want to have the band coming from kind of up high on like a power rack and you're going to sit back and your legs are going to be kind of suspended in the air as you curl your feet towards your butt. That one is kind of hard to consistently keep rep execution the same because as you fatigue, you're more likely to let your knees drop and kind of use a little bit of change in angle to continue to accrue reps. For the lying banded leg curl, it's probably a little bit more consistent. but it's important that you wedge your hips up in some way. So kind of like we were talking about with the leg curl in the commercial gym where you create that teepee effect for your hips, you're going to want to kind of do the same thing with the banded one. So you can either lay on a bench, which would be great. If you can lay on a bench and have your feet hanging off the back, you can tie the band to the bottom of the power rack and curl your legs up like that. If you're lying straight on the ground, you're going to want to put like a couple of ab mats or a couple of sweatshirts underneath your hips. to kind of wedge that up and create a little bit more range of motion there. But like any of the banded movements, the issue is that there going to be no tension at the length and position. Like when your legs are extended, you're going to have very little tension. And then there's going to be a ton of tension increasing as the band resistance gets, the feet get closer to the butt. So, those are the two banded variations. I don't love them. I do really like rower slider leg curls. So you can use a rower, the seat of a rower, and you can kind of wedge yourself onto your upper back and curl your feet towards your butt. Or you can use the slider leg curls, which I also really like. So you can either use a towel on a wood floor and kind of put your feet on the towel and curl your legs in towards your butt. Make sure you keep your hips elevated. Or you can just use socks on a wood floor, and that seems to work fine as well. But again, both of those you can't load them. So you reach a point where you can do 15 or 20 reps and you're just kind of like, what do I do from here? There's the gliding leg curl. And so actually ring leg curl, let's talk about ring leg curl first. So this one's pretty simple. You have some rings hanging from the the power rack or from the ceiling. You put them pretty low and you wedge your heels into the ring and you curl again, you can't add load to this not one of my favorites. Then we have the two gliding leg curl variations. And I really like the gliding leg curls. So for this one, what you would do is you set up a barbell and a power rack. You're holding the barbell with your hands and then your feet are on a box. And so your body is gliding towards your feet and back away. This one is also kind of hard to load, but you can load it by adding like a dip belt across your waist. or some chains or something like that. And then my favorite variation is the ring gliding leg curl. And so for this one, instead of holding your hands on a barbell, you would hold your hands on some rings, which means the rings are moving with your body as you move. Your feet are up on a box still, and you can load chains across, you can use a dip belt, you can add load that way. And so I've actually had clients be able to load that progressively up to perpetuity basically. to the point that he couldn't even do 12 or 15 reps anymore. And so the box was like a 30 inch box, the body was down nice and low and there was the chains across his hips. And so that one is probably the most loadable option for those at home unless you wanna use the banded variations, which you can also load. But those are kind of the primary ones we stick to. How about you? Have you experienced any of those? What's your deal with the different at-home variations? I have done the gliding ones, the ring gliding ones. Those are pretty much the best of the modification, like you said. Those are the one that you can have some runway there. One thing I wanted to ask you, I noticed there was none of the lying dumbbell hamstring curl variation. Excuse me. Is there a particular reason that you didn't include that one? I mean, I know why I typically don't. Yeah, so that actually is a really good option and one that we do include in our programming. So thank you for reminding me of that. The reason I didn't include it, I think is because I've began to veer away from it. And the main reason that I do is because it is so hard to get the dumbbell into position on your feet properly without a partner there to help you, especially as the loads get heavier and you get stronger. And so I've actually tried this myself because I wanted to make sure. that, hey, if I'm going to prescribe this movement, I want to make sure I can tell people how to get into position. And I spent like it felt like 20 minutes. It was probably like five minutes trying to get this dumbbell into my feet to actually curl it. And I could not get it comfortable at all without somebody actually placing it in my feet for me properly. The nice thing about the dumbbell leg curl variation is that it is lengthened overloaded. It's the only one of those options that is lengthened overloaded. So there is some benefit in that if you can get it into position comfortably. And if you're a less strong human, you may find that movement much more conducive than a stronger human would that might need a 60 or 80 pound dumbbell between their legs. But if you're using a 20 or a 30, it's gonna be much easier for you to kind of get through that movement, I think. The only way that I've seen it work where it kind of works out decently well is when you have the dumbbells that are not like the typical home or CrossFit gym style, like rubber hexagon ones, you have the like flat, you know, kind of dumbbells that you'll find more with the plates. Yeah. And if you have like a decline bench so that you're, you can put your feet closer to the floor to pick it up. If you have both of those, it can be viable. Without those, it is very, very challenging to actually incorporate in a practical manner. Yeah, I tend to program it for our quickie program, which is like a 30 minute dumbbell only program, because I feel like most of the people doing 30 minute dumbbell only quickie are probably not in the higher echelon of like strength level or body size that would require higher levels of strength output. So that's kind of my rationalization there, but I do appreciate that you brought that up because I did forget to include that one in my list. That is one to just make a quick funny aside. I've never been a fan of like the variation for the sake of variation. And sometimes in commercial gyms, I'll see people doing that. And there was one time I remember that we were we were in a very, very well equipped gym and there was a dude over in the dumbbell section doing that. And I'm like, we have a seated ham curl. Hehehehehe fucking why? Why there's no good reason why you're doing this exercise in here. And that's always something like every time that the conversation comes up, I have like that vivid memory of him doing it and me just being very frustrated about it. Yeah, that's variation for variation sake for sure. And then to finish off home gym stuff, you know, the at home reverse hyper would be the only other one that I would throw in there. And I don't program this very often because it's also kind of an annoying setup, but you can take an inclined bench and you can lean your torso over the back of the inclined bench so that your head is kind of heading down toward the seat. And then your hips and your legs are able to freely move off the backside. And I've actually been able to do that one with a dumbbell between my feet, because you don't need a ton of weight. It's not like the lying leg girl. It's a much longer moment arm. And so I can do that with like a 15 or 20 pound dumbbell between my feet and get a ton of benefit from it. But again, I mean, you're talking about like way down the rabbit hole of movements that you would even want to program in that situation. It's just when you get into the home gym hamstring world, you can only do so many RDLs. And that's the thing like what I've found with programming is that a knee flexion is important. It is important for health of your your knees that you do knee flexion. It's important for the development of the the biceps, the short biceps femoris that you that you get the lying leg curls well because that the short head doesn't get trained. through hip extension. So you do have to do some knee flexion if you want to train the short head of that hamstring muscle. And so yeah, I just, it's tough and you can, like I said, you can only do so many RDLs. And so I think for variation for variation sake, sometimes it's just nice to not have to do so many RDLs and to still be able to train your hamstrings in a lower fatigue state. Yeah, one thing I want to quickly squeeze in before I move on. I do find that we are potentially kind of in a Renaissance beginning to come into like a Renaissance era of home gym innovation. I've seen some pretty cool things that people are making like kits that bolt on to like the rogue racks and stuff where you have a lot more like standing unilateral leg curl options and different things like that with some pretty, pretty cool attachments. So if you. If you are a listener who has the home gym has been feeling limited, like there are some pretty cool new options out there that will pretty dramatically increase your exercise variation abilities. that's a good point. The one, the new one, you're the one you're talking about where you can literally take this piece and you clip it into your power rack. It goes in almost like a, a, a J clip would the way it kind of goes in and then rotates in and snaps in kind of the same idea here. You can get a leg extension, leg curl attachment for your power rack and it's, you know, plate loaded or whatever. So, so yeah, to Aaron's point, you can do that for sure. And then there's a cool piece of equipment that I keep getting ads for on Instagram called. the freak athlete. And it's a GHR, GHD hip extension, plus like three or four other things all in one and it like folds up like an ironing board and then comes back out. So it might be worth looking into if you're a home gym person as well. Cool. And then just moving on here quickly, we always spend the least amount of time on the dumbbell and bands program because most of the movements filter through from the other programs or the other training options, garage gym, home gym, full gym. So the dumbbell bands program, your RDLs are what your RDLs are. You can do dumbbell. RDLs, you could do a hip banded RDL. That's one thing we actually didn't mention in the other RDL variations across the other programs is a hip banded one, which I love. So if you have a dumbbell bands program, we've we've programmed hip banded dumbbell RDLs before. Like we mentioned in the home gym program, you're just limited on the leg curl options that you can do. And when you're having a dumbbell bands only program, you're even more limited because you're limited to lying banded seated banded lying dumbbell leg curl to your point that you brought up earlier. but there's no rower, there's no rings, there's no barbell to do gliding leg curls. You can't really even assume a box. So you don't necessarily have a box to do those. You can't really do the hip extension variations where you're over a barbell or over a box, because again, you can't assume that people have a barbell or a box in a dumbbell only program. So what I tend to lean on there really is the different RDL variations. single leg versions trying to keep it as interesting as I can using different RDL options. And then we do a lot of slider leg curls or banded leg curls. And then another one that I use is the dumbbell only program is hamstring walkouts. So this would be almost like a scale for people that can't do the slider leg curls yet, but you would elevate your hips and you would just slowly walk your feet out and then walk your feet back in and walk your feet out. feedback in. And so you can get some hamstring stimulus that way as well. But hamstring work in a dumbbell and bands only program is definitely going to be more limited. And that kind of just is par for the course there. So one that I actually just remembered that I can't believe I actually forgot about this one because it's the only form of this exercise that I like a banded good morning where you put the band around your neck and then you stand on the other other end and then you perform a good morning in that manner where it's more like sorry shortened overload because as you're standing up the band elongates but that's one that. I will use sometimes as like a double back offset or something like that. We do an RDL, we do a back off and then I might like drop set to, you know, 60 seconds of banded good mornings or something like that. And that is one that I think could be pretty effective in like a home gym or a dumbbell bands only program for sure. Yeah, for sure. I use that one as well. I actually really like that as a secondary movement where it might become like a dumbbell RDL into like a superset into banded good morning. That could work really well. I find it difficult to program that as like a primary movement, like, hey, part C banded good mornings, unless you're like, you know, accumulate 75 reps in as few sets as possible. I'll program it like that sometimes where you expect them to knock out 25 and then it's like rest 30 seconds, knock out 10, 30 seconds, knock out 10. Like you can certainly get a good stimulus like that, but it is hard to load it. As with any banded movement, it's really hard to load it effectively enough because it gets so hard at the short position that for you to make it even semi challenging at the length and position, it needs to be so much harder at the short position that you almost can't even fully extend at the top. So it is relegated mostly to like high rep sets there. Definitely. Well, I think that's all I have on the three various programs there. Yeah, I think for what is arguably the most simple and straightforward, you know, muscles to train, I feel like we did a pretty good job here, which, you know, I say we, but you did the definitely the lion's share of the work in this episode of covering it. I think the listeners will get will get some some some good insight and variation into some of the things. And we covered some pretty, pretty, you know, comprehensive depth on some of the the strength curve and different thing like that for. for the commercial gym stuff. So I'm pretty pumped about how this episode turned out. Yeah, for sure. I love these muscle group ones and we have arms left so we could either do biceps alone and then triceps alone or we could combine them into I think we should split them. Yeah. Took a... Yeah. Yeah. so just to kind of wrap up the hamstrings one, the main goal here is to get a hip extension and a knee flexion. So something where your legs are straight and your torso moves, and then something where your torso is static and your legs move, like curling into your butt. If you can combine RDLs with lying leg curls and hip extensions, 45 degree or GHD with seated leg curls, Those are your super combos that really train the hamstrings fully. But if you only have one of those combinations, that's fine too. So you can thoroughly train your hamstrings by literally just doing hip extension and knee flexion. Yep. Awesome. So as always, guys, thank you for listening. Brian and I will talk to you next week.