Squats and deadlifts are great hip/quad exercises for developing and increasing lower-body strength and power.
But if you really want to improve your athletic performance, you’ll also need to focus on the complementary, opposing muscles of the posterior chain — lower back, glutes, and hamstrings — especially the hamstrings.
Whether your goals include the development of power, strength, size, muscle endurance, or injury prevention, hamstring exercises — when paired with hip/quad exercises — can help you reach those goals.
At our facility, we favor hamstring exercises like Glute-Ham Raises and Romanian Deadlifts (RDLs) for the athletes we train. A recent study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that RDLs and Glute-Ham Raises produced more significant muscle activation than any other hamstring exercise.
Here’s an article from SpeedBot titled, The 10 Best Hamstring Exercises. The author discusses the best way to achieve muscle activation, based on the athlete’s training goals, and provides several hamstring exercise variations to include in your training routine to help improve your hamstring strength quickly.
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