Exercises That Don’t Fit the Mold (But Belong in Training)

Some of the most valuable exercises are the ones you rarely see. Simply they don’t lend themselves to conventional loading or loading.

Glute-hams or Nordic curls are a favourite in our gym. We have 6 dedicated stations for glute-hams. And these stations can be used for maybe one other exercise. And for a gym that values versatility, that’s a lot of space to dedicate to one exercise.

But the adaptation from glute ham raises is that useful and unique in my opinion (and science bears out to this assertion too: eccentric contractions are useful adaptations).

Glute hams cannot be measured conventionally. There are many little things going on.

For example, the first and most useful way to measure it: range of motion. The more distance you cover and the harder the exercise gets. This is due to the moment arm you create as you move further down.

But little cues like asking clients to maintain a posterior pelvic tilt through the exercise and driving into the knees and leading with the hips make a world of a difference in the feedback and contraction in the hamstring (if these cues don’t make sense to you, that’s fine!). When the same exercise is performed with an anterior pelvic tilt, the feedback is quite different (bias towards the bottom of the hamstring and back muscles).

Long story short. Not all moves lend themselves to straightforward measure like a deadlift, squat or push up. And you won’t see people performing them in most gyms or facilities. But the value can be immense. Glute hams serve as a good complement/substitute to/for deadlifting, squatting and hamstring curls. I am not saying that the stimulus is identical. All those exercises produce very distinct adaptations and outcomes. But having the option to mix, match and/or replace those moves really does help with more robust training outcomes.