Updated ATG Ham Curl / Nordic System

How to use the Ham Roller for injury resistance.

Commercial gyms usually have hamstring (the muscles on the back of your thigh) machines, but a surprising number of athletes - especially in the sports with the most knee surgeries - don’t have ham curl machines in their gyms!

1/4. Ham Roller, 2 Legs

2/4. Ham Roller, 2 Legs Up, 1 Leg Down

Your goal is to control the whole way down without losing tension.

3/4. Ham Roller, 1 Leg

For an athlete who’s had a knee or hamstring injury, I advise getting good - and relatively balanced - ability on each leg as a commonsense part of return to sport.

4/4. Nordic Negative

Your intent is to control your body’s weight down, then push back up.

You control difficulty with how far you reach (closer is easier and farther is harder).

Ham Curl Equipment

At the low end, moving sliders or even a piece of cardboard can work.

At the high end, ham curl machines cost thousands of dollars and are hard to move around, making them unrealistic for most home, CrossFit and SCHOOL gyms (and high school sports have the most ACL tears!).

Enter The Ham Roller

I’m able to line up TEN of these and train high school classes of 20-30 students with ease, smoothly scaling to each person’s ability.

They’re virtually indestructible, and user-friendly on almost any gym surface. There’s nothing special about ours, but we do have the lowest price for USA-made: atgequipment.com.

Nordic Equipment

A Nordic bench makes sense for gyms with ample money, but you can always find something immovable, and simple/accessible doesn’t mean it’s not ADVANCED!

For example, this was the knee flexion exercise used for more than a decade by Jonathan Edwards, whose 30-year-old world triple jump record STILL STANDS!

And since my specialty is rehab/regression, I came up with the idea of adjustable Nordic benches by angle. As a result, this is one of my mom’s favorite exercises. At 71, this helps support her ability to sprint, which is something she doesn’t want to lose.

Thanks for reading!

I hope this article has added to your exercise and injury-resistance skills.

Yours in Solutions,

Ben

Knee Ability Zero to Pro

Ham Roller & Nordic Bench

Shoes