A well planned hamstring hypertrophy workout does more than fill out the back of your legs. Strong, muscular hamstrings help you sprint faster, protect your knees, and balance out quad heavy training. With the right exercises, volume, and technique, you can grow your hamstrings noticeably in a few months, not years.
Below, you will learn how your hamstrings work, which movements actually build size, and how to put them together into a practical weekly plan.
Understand what your hamstrings do
Your hamstrings are not one simple muscle. They are a group of three muscles on the back of your thigh: the biceps femoris, semitendinosus, and semimembranosus. These muscles flex your knee and extend your hip, which means they help you bend your leg and drive your hips forward when you walk, run, or lift [Cara Hartman, 2019].
Since the hamstrings cross both the hip and knee joints, you need to train both hip hinge movements and knee flexion movements for complete hypertrophy. The RP Strength Complete Hamstring Training Guide explains that stiff legged deadlifts, good mornings, and similar hip hinges load the hamstrings in one way, while leg curls load them in another, and both are required for full development.
Many typical leg days lean heavily on squats, leg presses, and lunges, which mainly target your quads. Over time this can leave you quad dominant with underdeveloped hamstrings, something that shows up in both performance and higher injury risk during cutting, jumping, and landing.
Choose exercises that actually grow size
Because the hamstrings have multiple heads and functions, the best hamstring hypertrophy workout uses a mix of big compound moves and isolation work. The research you saw in the brief highlights several key categories.
Heavy hip hinge movements
Hip hinge exercises load your hamstrings hard, especially in the stretched position.
- Conventional deadlifts
A conventional deadlift heavily loads your hamstrings by emphasizing hip extension, while also engaging your core, hips, and back. A 2024 TrainHeroic guide on hamstring exercises notes that this is a highly effective way to build both hamstring strength and size. - Romanian deadlifts (RDLs)
Romanian deadlifts keep a soft bend in the knees and push the hips back, which creates a deep stretch and strong contraction for the hamstrings. They target the posterior chain more than conventional deadlifts and are often treated as a cornerstone hamstring hypertrophy workout.
Other hinge variations like stiff legged deadlifts and good mornings do a similar job, but RDLs tend to be easier to learn and load progressively.
Knee flexion and curl variations
Since one of the primary jobs of the hamstrings is to flex the knee, you also need leg curl variations.
- Nordic hamstring curls
Nordics isolate knee flexion very strongly. You anchor your feet and lower your body under control, then use your hamstrings to resist the fall. A 2024 article on hamstring training notes that Nordic curls are excellent for increasing muscle hypertrophy and strength, especially in the eccentric phase. - Machine leg curls
Lying, seated, or standing leg curls let you take the hamstrings through a full range of motion without your grip or lower back cutting a set short. Research in 2024 comparing seated vs prone leg curls found that seated leg curls, which place the hip in about 90 degrees of flexion, led to greater increases in overall hamstring volume and especially in the biceps femoris long head than prone leg curls at around 30 degrees of hip flexion.
This suggests that training at longer muscle lengths, like in the seated leg curl, is particularly effective for hypertrophy.
Supporting and advanced movements
You can add variety and extra stimulus with a few more options.
- Hip thrusts
Often used for glutes, hip thrusts also recruit your hamstrings because they extend the hip. Positioning your feet slightly farther forward, wider than 90 degrees, or using a bench setup can increase hamstring involvement during the lift. - Glute ham raises and GHD hip extensions
On a Glute Ham Developer (GHD), glute ham raises and hip extensions let you train both hip extension and knee flexion. Focusing on squeezing your hamstrings and glutes during each rep helps maximize engagement and growth.
Over time, combining these movements lets you target all regions of the hamstrings rather than treating them as one single muscle.
Match volume and reps to your goal
Even the best exercise selection will fall flat if you do not use enough weekly volume or the right rep ranges. The 2024 RP Strength guide outlines useful training landmarks:
- Minimum Effective Volume (MEV): the least amount of work that builds muscle
- Maximum Adaptive Volume (MAV): the range that builds muscle the fastest
- Maximum Recoverable Volume (MRV): the most work you can recover from
For most people, you will start closer to MEV and slowly add sets over 8 to 12 weeks, pushing into MAV as your work capacity and strength improve.
A typical weekly hamstring program uses 2 to 3 different exercises. RP Strength recommends only one hamstring exercise per training session, with exercise choices changed infrequently to reduce injury risk and let you progress.
For rep ranges:
- Heavy sets of 5 to 10 reps are ideal for hip hinge exercises like RDLs and deadlifts. Going heavier than this often shifts fatigue into your lower back rather than your hamstrings.
- Moderate to light sets of 10 to 30 reps work very well for leg curls. This keeps tension on the hamstrings without overloading the postural muscles that hold you in place.
As a rule of thumb, you want hard working sets where you are within 1 to 3 reps of muscular failure. If you finish a set and feel like you could have done 8 more reps, the set was probably too easy to drive hypertrophy.
Use technique that targets hamstrings, not your lower back
Form is especially important for hamstring hypertrophy. You are trying to put tension into the muscles on the back of your thigh, not just move weight from A to B.
For hip hinge movements:
- Hinge at your hips rather than rounding through your spine
- Keep a soft bend in your knees and maintain that bend as you lower
- Lower the bar until you feel a strong but tolerable stretch in your hamstrings, then drive your hips forward to stand
For leg curls:
- Start from full knee extension on each rep, do not cheat by starting half bent
- Curl the pad all the way until it reaches your butt or as close as your structure allows
- Control the lowering phase rather than letting the weight drop
The 2024 RP Strength training guide emphasizes that using a full range of motion on both hinges and curls is critical for maximizing hypertrophy and minimizing injury risk. Fast, partial reps usually mean you are leaving growth on the table.
Sample hamstring hypertrophy workouts
You can structure a hamstring focused week in a few different ways depending on how often you train legs. Below is a simple template you can plug into your current program.
Two hamstring focused sessions per week
You will use one hinge and one curl variation per workout. Start at about 3 working sets per exercise and build up over several weeks.
Workout A
Romanian deadlift
- 3 to 4 sets of 6 to 8 reps
- Rest 2 to 3 minutes between sets
Seated leg curl
- 3 to 4 sets of 10 to 15 reps
- Rest 90 seconds to 2 minutes
Workout B
Conventional deadlift or single leg RDL
- 3 sets of 5 to 6 reps
- Rest 2 to 3 minutes
Nordic hamstring curl or lying leg curl
- 3 to 4 sets of 8 to 12 reps (use assistance or a band if needed)
- Rest 2 minutes
For many lifters, this adds up to about 12 weekly sets for hamstrings, similar to the sample routine mentioned in the research that used 4 sets each of Romanian deadlifts, lying leg curls, and seated leg curls. This is usually enough to stimulate growth for intermediate trainees.
When you want extra emphasis
If your hamstrings are lagging and you recover well, you can add a third lighter hamstring touch later in the week:
- Hip thrusts: 3 sets of 10 to 12 reps
- High rep leg curls: 2 to 3 sets of 15 to 20 reps
Keep this session submaximal so you are not doing heavy hinge work three times each week.
Add intensity gradually and intelligently
Two common reasons hamstring hypertrophy stalls are not enough volume and not enough intensity. The research notes that techniques like forced reps, drop sets, and rest pause sets can help you push beyond failure and increase the growth stimulus when basic straight sets stop progressing.
You can apply these sparingly:
- On your last set of seated leg curls, do a drop set by reducing the weight by 20 to 30 percent once you reach failure, then continue to near failure again.
- Use rest pause on Nordics by performing small clusters of 3 to 4 reps, resting 15 to 20 seconds, and repeating until you hit a target total rep count.
What you do not want to do is treat Romanian deadlifts as a light stretch. The research points out that progressive strength gains in RDLs are a major driver of size. Track your working weights and aim to add small amounts of weight or extra reps over time while maintaining form.
Consider individual differences in hamstring response
Not every hamstring responds to the same program in the same way. A 2024 study titled “Individual distribution of muscle hypertrophy among hamstring muscle heads: Adding muscle volume where you need is not so simple” showed that different heads of the hamstrings can grow at different rates even under the same training.
The authors highlighted that:
- Some hamstring muscles respond more to certain exercises than others
- Generic programs can produce imbalances or suboptimal hypertrophy for some people
- Trainers should regularly assess and adapt hamstring workouts to the individual
In practice, this means you should pay attention to where you feel exercises and which areas of your hamstrings are actually changing. If you notice that your outer hamstrings are growing but the inner portion lags, you might benefit from adjusting exercise selection, stance, or using more unilateral work like single leg RDLs and standing leg curls.
Why eccentrics and long muscle lengths matter
Several of the studies in 2024 highlight the value of eccentric training and working at longer muscle lengths for hamstring hypertrophy.
- A 12 week comparison of Nordic Hamstring Training (NHT) and Lengthened State Eccentric Training (LSET) reported that LSET produced greater increases in overall hamstring muscle volume, about +18 percent, and in the biceps femoris long head, about +19 percent, compared with NHT which showed +11 percent and +5 percent increases. LSET also produced larger increases in maximum eccentric knee flexion torque.
- Another 12 week study in 20 adults found that training on the seated leg curl, with the hip flexed, produced about +14.1 percent increases in whole hamstring muscle volume versus +9.3 percent with prone leg curls at a shorter muscle length. The biceps femoris long head showed roughly 2.2 times greater hypertrophy in the seated condition than in the prone condition.
- A 6 week eccentric program combining Nordic hamstring exercises and single leg deadlifts in young female dance students significantly increased both concentric and eccentric hamstring strength more than static stretching or no intervention. This group also saw larger gains in hamstring flexibility on the active straight leg raise test.
Together, these findings suggest that you get more growth and functional strength by:
- Including eccentric focused work, for example slow lowering phases or exercises like Nordics and controlled RDLs
- Training your hamstrings at longer muscle lengths, for example seated curls instead of only prone curls, and deep stretches in hinge patterns
You do not have to turn every set into an eccentric protocol, but consciously controlling the lowering portion and choosing exercises that stretch the hamstrings under load will help.
Putting it all together
If you want your hamstring hypertrophy workout to deliver real changes in size and strength, focus on a few core principles:
Combine a heavy hip hinge, a full range leg curl, and progressive overload over at least 8 to 12 weeks, then layer in eccentric emphasis and small intensity techniques as needed.
Start with two hamstring sessions per week, each with one hinge and one curl. Use 5 to 10 reps for hinges and 10 to 30 reps for curls. Control the eccentric, use a full range of motion, and track your progress so you are gradually doing more over time.
From there, adjust based on how you recover and where you see growth. With consistent attention to both the science and your own feedback, you will build stronger, fuller hamstrings that support everything else you do in the gym.
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