Hamstring strains are the most common muscle injury in team sports. We have had an exercise proven to reduce their incidence by 51% for over a decade. Most athletic programmes still do not include it.
The gap between what sport science knows and what coaches programme is nowhere more stark than in eccentric hamstring training. The evidence is unambiguous. The adoption rate is not.
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The hamstring tears almost exclusively during the late swing phase of sprinting — the moment the muscle is simultaneously at maximum length and decelerating the limb. It is an eccentric failure: the muscle cannot produce enough force while lengthening under load.
Conventional hamstring training — leg curls, Romanian deadlifts, good mornings — targets concentric and isometric strength. These movements build the muscle when it is shortening or static. They do not train the specific mechanical demand that causes the injury.
Eccentric overload does. By loading the muscle as it lengthens — beyond the resistance possible concentrically — you build both the peak force capacity and the structural resilience the hamstring needs to survive high-speed running.
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Petersen et al. (2011) randomised 942 male football players across 50 teams to either a Nordic hamstring curl programme or standard training. The Nordic curl group showed a 51% reduction in overall hamstring injuries and a 65% reduction in recurrent strains over the season.
The Nordic hamstring exercise (NHE) requires no equipment beyond a partner or ankle strap. From a kneeling position, the athlete lowers their torso toward the ground under eccentric hamstring control, catching themselves with their hands, then uses the hamstrings concentrically to return to upright.
The movement directly mimics the late-swing eccentric demand. It is also extraordinarily uncomfortable, which partially explains the adoption gap.
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Askling et al. (2012) extended this to Swedish Hamstrings — a lengthened-position eccentric exercise — in elite Swedish male footballers. Athletes who completed the 10-week programme prior to the season had significantly fewer hamstring strains than matched controls using conventional protocols.
The critical variable is muscle length during loading. Research by Schache and colleagues established that hamstring injuries during sprinting occur when the muscle is near its functional maximum length. Training only at mid-range — as leg curls do — leaves the high-risk lengthened zone completely unloaded.
Eccentric exercises performed through full range, particularly the Nordic curl and its progressions, shift the optimum angle of force production to longer muscle lengths, creating a structural shift that persists for the entire season.
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The first repeated bout effect is relevant here. The first session of eccentric loading causes significant DOMS — often severe enough that athletes and coaches abandon the protocol. This is not damage; it is the normal adaptation signal. By session three or four, DOMS is minimal and strength gains are accumulating.
Programming recommendation: begin with 2×5 assisted Nordic curls (band support reduces the load to a manageable entry point), progressing to 3×8 full Nordic curls over 6–8 weeks. Volume should be sequenced before the season starts, not during — in-season maintenance requires only 1×6 weekly to preserve the adaptation.
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The application extends beyond football. Any sport with a sprint component — rugby, athletics, basketball, cricket — shares the same late-swing mechanics and the same injury mechanism. The evidence base spans enough sports and populations that there is no reasonable argument for excluding it from a periodised programme.
For strength coaches programming 1RM-based loading, eccentric overload exercises operate at 110–130% of concentric 1RM. Calculating that threshold accurately means knowing the athlete's current 1RM with precision — not estimate, not last month's result. Overloaded eccentric work at the wrong load fails to trigger the adaptation or creates actual injury.
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Fifty-one percent is not a marginal gain. It is the difference between a hamstring-injury-free season and the kind of soft-tissue catalogue that defines most professional clubs' physio logs.
The exercise is free, evidence-based, and implementable tomorrow. The only cost is the initial discomfort of loading a muscle in a position it has never been seriously challenged.
Is the Nordic curl already in your programme — and if not, what has been the barrier to adding it?