Nordic Hamstring Exercises: The Coach's 10-Week Team Program

The Nordic hamstring exercise has the strongest evidence of any single exercise for reducing hamstring injury risk. It is also one of the least used. That gap is the reason for this guide.

Most pages about the Nordic curl teach one athlete how to do one rep. A coach does not have that problem. A coach has twenty athletes, a short window, and a season to get through. This guide gives you the team version. A 10-week program with sets and reps. A regression ladder so every athlete can start today. And a plan for keeping it going once games begin.

One thing up front. No exercise prevents hamstring strains. The research below describes programs that reduce the rate of them. That is a real result, and it is the honest claim. Anyone in pain or coming back from an injury should see a physical therapist or physician first.

What the Nordic hamstring exercise is

The Nordic hamstring exercise is a partner or anchor assisted bodyweight movement. The athlete kneels upright with the ankles held down. Then the athlete lowers the torso toward the floor as slowly as possible. The hamstrings resist the fall the whole way. It is an eccentric exercise, which means the muscle produces force while it lengthens.

The payoff is large. Programs built around this one exercise have cut hamstring injury rates by roughly half. Few interventions in sports medicine show a number that clean.

That is why it anchors most modern hamstring programs. It needs almost no equipment. It fits inside a normal training session. And it targets the exact tissue that fails.

What you need to run it

The setup is cheap, which is part of the appeal. Each athlete needs a soft surface for the knees. A folded mat, a towel, or grass all work. The other requirement is a way to hold the ankles down.

You have a few options for the ankle anchor. A partner kneeling behind and pressing on the heels is the simplest and costs nothing. A loaded barbell across the back of the ankles works if you have plates. A dedicated Nordic bench or a strap hooked under a heavy, immovable base works too. Any of these is fine. Pick whatever lets you run the whole group at once without a bottleneck.

That is the entire kit. No machines. No special footwear. For a team, the partner method means the whole roster can work in pairs at the same time, which is what keeps the session short.

Why it works

A hamstring strain in sprinting usually happens late in the swing phase of a stride. The muscle is lengthening and braking the lower leg at the same time. That is a high force eccentric moment. It is the moment the muscle is most likely to tear.

The Nordic curl trains that exact pattern. Under load, it builds eccentric strength and lengthens the biceps femoris fascicles. Longer, stronger fascicles handle the braking demand of a fast stride with more margin.

Put simply, you are training the muscle the way it gets loaded right before it fails. Most other hamstring exercises do not do this. A leg curl machine loads the muscle as it shortens. The sprint loads it as it lengthens. The Nordic curl matches the sprint.

There is a second benefit. Stronger eccentric hamstrings also help athletes decelerate and change direction. So the same work that lowers strain risk tends to make athletes more durable in general. The injury result is the headline. It is not the only return.

What the evidence actually shows, and what it does not

Two large trials in men's soccer are worth knowing.

In amateur players, adding the exercise to regular training significantly lowered hamstring injury rates. The same trial found no reduction in how severe the injuries were when they did happen. So the exercise changes how often, not how bad.

In a separate cluster trial, a 10-week progressive build followed by a weekly in-season dose cut acute hamstring injuries in men's soccer teams. That 10-week structure is the backbone of the program below.

Both trials were in soccer, which is where most of the research sits. Soccer is a useful test case. It combines repeated sprinting with fatigue, the same demand that shows up in football, rugby, track, and field sports. The mechanism does not care what jersey the athlete wears. A hamstring strains under high-speed lengthening in any sport that sprints.

Read those results carefully. Fewer injuries, not zero. A program reduces risk. It does not remove it. Keep that framing with your athletes so the expectation stays honest.

The 10-week Nordic hamstring program

Here is a coach-ready build. It starts light. It adds volume over the first five weeks. Then it holds. The structure mirrors the progressive programs used in the research. Progress by adding sessions and reps first. Only add tempo or load once full range is clean.

A few rules make this work on a real team. Do the Nordic work after the warm-up and before heavy sprinting or lifting, while the athletes are fresh. Keep the lower slow, around three to four seconds. Athletes catch themselves with the hands at the bottom. Then they push back up to the start with the arms, so the hamstrings only do the lowering.

Expect soreness in the first two weeks. That is normal for a new eccentric exercise. The slow ramp in weeks one through three is there to manage it. Do not skip ahead. Rushing the early volume is the fastest way to lose the room.

If you want a simple progress check, watch the break point. Early on, most athletes lose control and drop somewhere around the halfway mark. As the weeks add up, that break point moves closer to the floor. You do not need a lab. The range an athlete can control is the number that matters, and you can see it.

One note on who should scale back. An athlete with a recent hamstring injury, current pain, or a relevant medical condition should not jump into full-range Nordics. Clear them with a physical therapist or physician first. Then start them low on the ladder below and progress slowly. When in doubt, less range and more control is the safer call.

Slot this into your existing week rather than bolting on a separate session. If you are building a plan from scratch, a complete weekly strength and conditioning template gives you the frame to drop it into.

The regression ladder, so every athlete can start today

Most athletes cannot lower under control through a full range on day one. That is expected. The point is not a perfect Nordic curl in week one. The point is to load the hamstring eccentrically at a level each athlete can actually control, then progress. Use this ladder. Move an athlete up a rung only when they own the current one.

One roster will span several rungs at once. That is fine. Run the same program structure for everyone and let each athlete work at their rung. The sets, reps, and sessions stay the same. Only the variation changes.

How to coach the movement

Setup is simple. The athlete kneels on a pad. A partner or a loaded bar pins the ankles. The body stays in a straight line from knee to shoulder. Then the athlete lowers forward as slowly as possible, resisting with the hamstrings, and catches with the hands near the bottom.

Coach it with external cues. Land like the floor is hot works better than squeeze your hamstrings. Stay tall and long works better than keep your hips extended. Athletes learn movement faster from a picture of the outcome than from a list of muscles.

Three faults show up most. The first is bending at the hips, so the athlete folds instead of lowering in a straight line. Cue a long line from knee to shoulder. The second is dropping fast once the hamstrings fatigue. Cut the reps before that happens. The third is arching the low back to steal range. Cue a tight, flat middle. Quality beats range every time.

Where it fits in a training week and season

Timing matters as much as the exercise. Start the build in the preseason, before sprint volume climbs. Then hold a maintenance dose all season. The most common and most avoidable mistake is stopping the work once games begin.

The Nordic curl is one piece, not the whole plan. Pair it with progressive sprint exposure and a proper warm-up. It sits naturally inside the full hamstring strain prevention program, which covers the sprint and warm-up side in detail. For knee and landing risk, the same warm-up window can carry a structured neuromuscular warm-up.

Two to three times a week during the build. Once a week to maintain. Year round beats a hard block that stops in month two. Consistency is the whole game here.

The bigger the group, the more this depends on structure rather than memory. For a school or club running one program across a full roster with a small staff, build the Nordic work into the shared plan so every team runs the same dose in the same weeks.

The real problem is not the exercise. It is doing it.

Here is the uncomfortable part. The evidence is strong, and coaches still do not run the program. A survey of top European clubs found that only 11 to 17 percent actually completed the full program. At the highest level of the sport, with full medical staffs, most teams left the result on the table.

The reason is not knowledge. It is adherence. A 10-week program only works if the athletes do the reps, in the right weeks, at the right dose. On a real roster that falls apart quietly. A few athletes skip the Nordic work. A week gets missed during a busy stretch. By midseason the program exists on paper and nowhere else.

That is a tracking problem, not a training problem. If you can see who actually did the work, you can fix it before it costs a season.

Completion tracking is the difference between a program that ran and one that only got written. When you can see the work, you can protect it.

The Nordic hamstring exercise is the closest thing to a sure bet in this space. Build it in slowly. Scale it to each athlete. Keep it going all season. And make sure the work actually happens. Do those four things and you have given your team a real, evidence-based edge against the most common injury in the sport.