reckonerNordic curl
Kneel with your ankles held down and lower yourself face first toward the floor as slowly as you can. Almost nobody can do a full one at first, and that is expected: this is an exercise you scale rather than one you either have or do not.
Fight the fall, hips stay extended.
- Pattern
- Knee isolation
- Trains
- Hamstrings
- Kit
- Bodyweight, floor
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 10 to 15 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- Nothing to add, so the sets climb instead
- Skill
- Technical, worth coaching
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Knee
Muscles worked
How to do it
Anchor your ankles properly
Under a loaded barbell, a machine's foot pads, or a partner holding hard. It has to be genuinely solid, because the whole exercise is a lever against that anchor and a slip means landing on your face.
Kneel with something soft under your knees
A mat or a folded towel. Hips extended so your body is a straight line from knee to shoulder. Hands up in front of your chest, ready to catch you.
Fight the fall, hips stay extended
That is the cue on your wrist and both halves matter. Lower forward as slowly as you can. If your hips bend, you have turned it into a fall from a shorter height and the hamstrings stopped working.
Catch yourself, then push back up
Catch with your hands when you can no longer hold. Push back to the start with your arms, which is the ordinary way to do this exercise rather than a failure to complete it.
What goes wrong
Breaking at the hips
The moment the hips bend, the exercise ends. It is the reflex response to the lever getting hard and it happens without you deciding to. Squeeze your glutes hard for the whole descent and keep a straight line from knee to shoulder.
Dropping instead of lowering
The value is in how long you resist. Falling fast and catching yourself is a repetition on paper and almost nothing in practice. If you can only control the first few degrees, control those and use your hands early.
Trying full range on day one
The honest scaling is a band around your chest, a partner's hands, or simply going as far as you can hold and pushing back. Programs including this exercise carried an injury risk ratio of 0.49 across 8,459 athletes, which the authors summarize as up to a 51 per cent reduction in hamstring injuries1, and that came from doing the exercise rather than from doing it perfectly.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3 x 10 | More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 3 x 11 | More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 3 x 12 | More reps 12 → 13 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 13 | More reps 13 → 14 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 14 | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 14 | More reps 14 → 15 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. The lighter week is over, so this is back to three sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
What is the Nordic curl actually good for?
Hamstring injury prevention has the strongest evidence: fifteen studies covering 8,459 athletes found programs including it roughly halved hamstring injury rates, and the finding held at a risk ratio of 0.55 when the studies at high risk of bias were removed1.
Does it replace a leg curl?
Not exactly. It is a knee bending pattern like a leg curl, and within the hamstrings it preferentially recruits the semitendinosus rather than the long head of biceps femoris, which is what hip extension patterns reach2. A full plan wants a hinge as well.
Will Reckoner give me this with a knee restriction?
No. Knee is the one restriction recorded against it, and it is the only leg curl in the library that records anything. It is also the highest skill movement of the four.
Similar movements
There is no load to ease on this lift, so Reckoner offers one of these the first time it stalls. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- van Dyk, Behan and Whiteley, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2019. Including the Nordic hamstring exercise in injury prevention programmes halves the rate of hamstring injuries: a systematic review and meta-analysis of 8459 athletes fifteen studies covering 8,459 athletes, programs including the Nordic curl carrying an injury risk ratio of 0.49, which the authors summarize as up to a 51 per cent reduction, and which stayed favorable at 0.55 when the studies at high risk of bias were removed
- Bourne and colleagues, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2017. Impact of exercise selection on hamstring muscle activation twenty-four men measured across ten hamstring exercises by surface electrodes and then by MRI, hip extension patterns preferentially recruiting the long head of biceps femoris and the Nordic curl preferentially recruiting the semitendinosus instead