Nordic curl: how to do it, how to build up to it, and what weeks of it changed

A Nordic curl, or Nordic hamstring curl, is a kneeling exercise for the back of your thighs. You kneel with your heels held down, keep your body straight from your knees to your head, and lean forward from the knees as slowly as you can, until you have to catch yourself with your hands. Your hamstrings do the work, bending against the fall while they lengthen. It needs no weights, and it's a hard exercise from the first rep.

This page covers the setup, how to anchor your heels at home or in a gym, how to build up to a full rep, what training studies measured, the faults, and the sets. The full hamstring session, a hinge plus a curl, is on the hamstring workout, and the machine version of the knee bend is the leg curl.

How to do a Nordic curl

1. Anchor your heels under something that won't move: a Nordic bench, a loaded barbell in a rack, or a partner holding your ankles. (The options are in the next section.)
2. Kneel on a pad, knees about hip-width apart, body upright, hands ready in front of your chest.
3. Squeeze your glutes and brace so your hips stay straight. The line from your knees to your head shouldn't bend at the hips.
4. Lower yourself forward by letting your knees straighten, as slowly as you can, resisting the fall the whole way.
5. Catch yourself with your hands when you can't hold it any longer, landing at the bottom of a push-up.
6. Come back up with a push from your hands, pulling with your hamstrings as much as you can, to the kneeling start. That's one rep.

Pointed feet or toes tucked under? In 15 male college athletes, activity in the biceps femoris, one of the hamstrings, was 124.5% of a maximal contraction with the ankle pointed and 128.1% with it bent up toward the shin, not a significant difference.¹ Use whichever keeps your heels anchored.

Anchoring your heels: bench, machine, strap or at home

What the Nordic curl trains

The hamstrings, and some of them more than others. Some of the knee-bending muscles at the back of your thigh also extend the hip, and some don't, and the Nordic curl doesn't load them evenly:

• Activity. In 15 trained women doing six hip-extension and knee-bending exercises, the Nordic curl, the leg curl and a kickback produced more biceps femoris activity than the Romanian deadlift and the step-up, and the authors found the Nordic curl consistently the highest of the six.²
• Growth, against a machine curl. In 42 healthy young men over 12 weeks, 14 in each group, Nordic curls grew the hamstrings by 11% and a weight-stack curl done with the hips bent grew them by 18%. The two favoured different muscles: the machine curl grew the knee-bending muscles that also extend the hip about twice as much, the Nordic curl those that don't.³
• Growth, against a hinge. In a nine-week trial of 36 people new to lifting, split into a Nordic curl group, a stiff-leg deadlift group and a group that didn't train, the two programs ran three times a week. Nordic curls grew the whole hamstrings by 11.4% and the semitendinosus, one of the inner hamstrings, by 24.3%; stiff-leg deadlifts grew the semimembranosus most.⁴

So the Nordic curl and a hip exercise grow different parts of the hamstrings. That's the reason the hamstring workout pairs a curl with a hinge.

What weeks of Nordic curls changed

• Muscle grew in every trial here that measured it. In 32 healthy young adults, 15 women and 17 men, training twice a week for six weeks, a Nordic curl program and a Romanian deadlift program that stressed the lowering both grew the hamstrings' cross-sectional area by about 10%, with no difference between them.⁵ In 20 healthy adults over six weeks, the group that added Nordic curls to stretching grew hamstring volume from 131.5 to 145.2 cubic centimetres; the stretching-only group didn't.⁶
• Strength results were mixed. In 40 recreationally active men over six weeks, eccentric knee-bending strength rose by 14 to 19% in three of the four volume plans tested.⁷ In the 20-adult trial, strength measured on a dynamometer didn't change significantly.⁶ And in the 42-man trial, the Nordic group's eccentric strength rose 11%, which didn't differ significantly from the 4% of the group that didn't train; the machine curl's 17% did.³

Read together: in these short trials, Nordic curls grew the hamstrings within six to twelve weeks, and whether strength rose depended on the trial and how it was tested.

Why so much of the research is about sport

Much of the Nordic curl research comes from sport and asks whether the exercise lowers the rate of hamstring strains. A PubMed search for this page found 368 records naming the exercise; 262 mention injury and 255 mention sport, athletes or players in the title or abstract. This page makes no claim about that question either way; it reports only what the studies measured in muscle and strength. If you're coming back from a hamstring problem, plan it with a doctor or a physical therapist.

How to build up to a full Nordic curl

If you can't yet lower yourself all the way under control, these make it easier while you build up:

• Lower part of the way. Go only as far as you can control, catch yourself early, and aim to control a little more of the range each week.
• Negatives with a hard push back. Do the lowering slowly and use your hands to push you most of the way back to the top. It's how the hamstring workout starts it.
• Band-assisted. A resistance band looped around your chest and anchored high behind you takes some of your weight. In 16 professional soccer players, Nordic curls assisted by 5 to 20% of body weight on a machine lowered the hamstrings' measured force and how hard the reps felt, and hamstring activity wasn't significantly lower than in the unassisted version.⁸ A 2026 study of 12 people found the opposite for force: its assisted versions produced more peak torque and more total muscle activity than the standard one, which the authors put down to the muscles working at greater length and for longer.⁹ In practice, assistance lets you control more of the lowering.
• Catch on a box. A bench or box in front of you shortens the range; lower it as you get stronger.

When you can lower all the way slowly for a set of five, make the lowering slower before you add reps.

Nordic curl alternatives

• The leg curl. In the 12-week trial above, the hip-bent machine curl grew the hamstrings more overall than the Nordic curl did. The leg curl covers seated and lying versions.
• The Romanian deadlift. In the six-week trial, it grew the hamstrings about as much as the Nordic curl when the lowering was stressed. It trains the other job, extending the hip: the Romanian deadlift.
• The glute-ham raise, on its own bench, a close cousin with the hips over a pad.
• Slider or towel curls at home: on your back, heels on a towel on a smooth floor, hips up, pull your heels in and push them out.

The reverse Nordic, leaning back from the knees, sounds similar but trains the front of the thigh; it's on the leg extension page.

The common faults, and a fix for each

• Bending at the hips. Sticking your hips back shortens the lever and makes it easier. Squeeze your glutes and keep the line from knees to head.
• Dropping instead of lowering. If you fall the moment you start, lower part of the way, or use a band.
• Heels lifting. The anchor isn't heavy enough. Add weight to the bar or find a heavier anchor.
• Hard floor under the knees. Kneel on a folded mat or a pad.
• Racing through the reps. The slow lowering is the exercise; rest between reps if you need to.
• Training through something that hurts. Sore muscles the next day are normal; a sharp or lasting hurt at the back of the thigh isn't. Stop, and see a doctor or a physical therapist.

Sets, reps and where it goes

• Two or three sets of 4 to 8 slow lowerings, once or twice a week, after your main lifts. The American College of Sports Medicine's 2026 position stand, which covers healthy adults, advises at least two sets per exercise.¹⁰
• It doesn't take much. In the 40-man trial, a plan of 48 reps over six weeks raised strength.⁷ Start there and build the number of reps over the weeks.
• Count it as your knee-bend slot, in place of a leg curl or next to one, with a hinge for the hip. Progressive overload covers how to keep adding.

If you'd rather not plan it alone

The Nordic curl is easy to learn and hard to do; fitting it next to your hinges and leg curls without leaving your hamstrings too sore to train is the part a page can't do. Coaching is the version where your workouts are built around the days you actually have, and a weekly call looks at the week you just had and rebuilds the next one. Coaching to build muscle explains how that works, and here's how to apply. Otherwise: at your next lower-body session, anchor your heels, do two sets of four slow lowerings, and write down how far you got.