As fitness information enthusiasts and consumers, we often hear about the importance of addressing any weakness in the posterior chain. It’s very well understood at this point that the muscle groups are comprised of the lower back, glutes, hamstrings, and even aspects of the groin muscles, respectively.

However, there still definitely seems to be an underappreciation and even arguably a shortage of impactful performance based hamstring exercises. It’s one thing to specify training and work the posterior chain, although, it’s another thing to make your training even more specific and target the hamstrings when it comes to building strength for speed purposes.

The Best Hamstring Drills for Improving Speed

The Modified Reverse Hyper

The amount of evidence to date to support glute-ham strength and its powerful impact on athletic performance tasks such as running, jumping, cutting, and sprinting is incredibly vast. Every single athlete and client for that matter should be performing several posterior chain dominant movements. Examples include; deadlifts, swings, sleds, lunges, angled split squats, and many more.

However, to my current knowledge the “Modified Reverse Hyper” has not received near as much attention for whatever reasons, and remains relatively unknown at this point to my understanding. The wonderful thing about this particular exercise is that you are training the hamstrings in a manner that is very akin to how they function during an actual sprint, and with the added benefit of some overload on your backside. This situation can help stimulate the addition of sarcomeres and result in increased hypertrophy to the muscles responsible for increasing acceleration and running speeds. What athlete wouldn’t want that?

Stability is key for Hamstring Strength

Secondly, you are provided a very stable foundation in which to exert high amounts of force and energy from resulting in greater strength production limits. This is a very important measure. Recall that the less stability you have in an exercise the less involvement of the prime movers, which in this case are critical to health and athletic performance potential. Strength has been found to be very specific to range of motion/training angles in research, and it obviously makes perfect sense. What doesn’t make sense is that there isn’t near enough weight room exercises that do a solid job in bridging the gap between strength and speed during the common act of hip hyperextension, which the hamstrings are primarily responsible for at increasing speed of movement. Sled marching, hill runs-sprint progressions, and quadruped work are great, but the room for loading is questionable and hard to manage, except for perhaps the quadruped variation if you have access to a pendulum apparatus or smith machine.

Here is an actual video of the exercise. As a disclaimer, the weight-bearing pressure of the weight can be brutal on the calves initially and will take some getting used to at first. Also, make sure the middle of the plates sit close to or directly behind the knee joint to prevent too much shearing and stress to the ACL and lower hamstring muscles.

The Single Leg Barbell Deadlift

Another extremely underutilized hamstring-specific strength exercise is the single-leg barbell deadlift (SLDL). Understandably so since it’s extremely difficult to perform in a truly overloaded state, and demands that any athlete looking to take up the challenge, possess remarkable and strength and stability from head to toe.

Start using both of the aforementioned drills interchangeably throughout your training program, and just watch two to three-tenths come off of your 40 and or 60 yard dash. Remember that when performing each of these every ounce of strength you will be developing at the time, will manifest through a much greater strength expression at push-off phases during sprinting.