My hamstrings are currently a weak point for me, and I recently threw together a contraption to support my feet allowing me to do natural GHRs.
I’m curious if anyone has had any success using natural GHRs as an assistance exercise. I realize that by doing them with the knees remaining stationary you eliminate the hip extension aspect of the movement. It seems that a lot of the hype surrounding the GHR revolves around working the hamstrings by doing both hip extension and knee flexion…
Anyone have any experience with these? I have to do my reps with some slight assistance at the bottom - I reach a point where I can’t control the descent, and from a dead stop I can’t do the concentric without a slight push. I’m wondering if anyone’s doing these unassisted or with added weight, and how they’ve affected your training.
Those are the only 2 articles on the site talking but natural ghr…I kind of have the same situation…dont know iff they are really effective…they really hard…most i done in one workout is 5 sets of 5 reps…
Would like to see other peoples view on this exercice!
As far as the knee flexion/hip extension thing…I was thinking that for hip extension I have good mornings, stiff leg and romanian deadlifts, etc. But for knee flexion I don’t have anything. Other than natural GHR’s the only thing I can think of is the various leg curl machines…which clearly I don’t have room for if I can’t find room for a full size GHR.
I really like this exercise. I perform them as eccentric like in Defranco’s article, or I will do them weighted. They really emphasize the work of the posterior chain and the hamstring.
As far as the knee flexion/hip extension thing…I was thinking that for hip extension I have good mornings, stiff leg and romanian deadlifts, etc. But for knee flexion I don’t have anything. Other than natural GHR’s the only thing I can think of is the various leg curl machines…which clearly I don’t have room for if I can’t find room for a full size GHR.[/quote]
You can probably find an incline ab board for even less than that. That’s what I use. I even took the bottom rollers out so I could use the hole to put a rack pin through. By doing this I can use my rack as the incline and attach bands to top of the rack for assistance. I didn’t need the bottom rollers as I was only doing straight leg incline sit-ups by hooking my feet under the top, most forward roller. I am tight on space as well, so ditching the leg that came with it was bonus.
Couple the incline with a band for deloading at the bottom, and you have much more even loading throughout the range of motion. Also a greater effective range of motion. I am not smart enough to know if this is really superior to regular old natty GHRs, but it feels better to me.