Things You'll Need:
- Weight lifting equipment
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Step 1
Begin your workout with brief cardiovascular exercise. This will warm up the hamstrings, as well as the other muscles in the body. Warming up the muscles before strength training helps prevent muscle pulls and other injuries.
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Step 2
Start with exercises that require no weight. Squats, lunges, flutter kicks and kickbacks can all be performed without additional weight, but still give your hamstrings a good workout. Beginning your training with these types of exercise will allow you to build a foundation of strength in your hamstrings and help prevent injury.
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Step 3
Add weight gradually to your exercises. Weighted squats and lunges target the hamstrings well. There are many different variations of these exercises including jump squats, walking lunges, duck squats, ball lunges and ball squats to name just a few.
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Step 4
Increase the difficulty of hamstring training by using the lying leg curl weight machine at the gym. Lie flat on your belly on the bench, put your ankles under the roller pad and curl up on the pad with your heels as far as you can go. Release the weight slowly to complete one repetition.
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Step 5
Try the seated leg curl machine for an alternative to lying down. Sit on the machine, place ankles on top of the roller bar and curl legs downward. Slowly return to the neutral position to finish.
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Step 6
Use the leg press machine to challenge your hamstrings with even greater weight. Because the leg press machine also engages your quadriceps and calves, you can often increase the weight on the stacks beyond what you could handle for leg curls.
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Step 7
Stretch out hamstring muscles by doing a slow toe touch either seated or standing. Lifting your leg up on a bench, chair or exercise ball and bending towards your toes also provides a good hamstring stretch.
