Duke Volleyball Assisted Hamstring Curl

With instruction from strength and conditioning coordinator Anne Tamporello, the Blue Devils use Assisted Hamstring Curls.

TRANSCRIPT

Anne Tamporello: The assisted hamstring curls; one of the main reasons that I do it is I use that as a precursor to the actual glute ham raise. Again that's one exercise that works the hamstrings at again both the knee and hip joint at the same time. The ham curls are a little less demanding, a little more forgiving, but at the same time they do still build strength and it t gives the body position that you would have on a glute ham raise. So it gets you used to a lot of different moving parts of the actual exercise. There's really only two main problems that come with this particular exercise. One of them would be with the partners. You really have to hold the ankles really, really hard. If you don't have the majority of your body weight on the person who's performing the exercise than the ankles come up off the ground than the entire idea of the exercise is going to be compromised. You're going to be rolling forward so you really have to stay fixed on the ground. As far as the person who's doing the exercise, the most common thing that we see done wrong is exactly what we're trying to fix for the glute ham raise, and that is the buckling at the waist. You tend to bend over from the waist up instead of keeping the hips pushed forward throughout the entire range of motion. So that's the main coaching point that I'm using there, that's also why I allow the athletes to go all the way down to the floor and use kind of a push up position to start on the way back to give them a little bit of momentum coming back so they're not as tempted to buckle at the waist and hopefully keep the hips pushed forward in a nice straight line throughout from the knee up. Sets and reps, again it is a precursor exercise so we're looking for a lot of quality on this one. So we'll do anywhere from three to four sets of about 10 to 12 reps.