When you sit down on a seated leg curl machine and get yourself into the starting position, it has the effect of stretching the hamstring muscles that cross the hip. Why did some muscles grow faster when they were trained with the seated leg curl? In the short head of biceps femoris, the hamstring muscle that doesn’t cross the hip, there was no significant difference in growth between the seated and lying leg curl. So what happened? If you had to choose between the seated and lying leg curl, which one should you pick, and why? Is the Seated Leg Curl Better Than the Lying Leg Curl?Īfter 12 weeks of training, the seated leg curl stimulated around 55% more muscle growth than the lying leg curl, with all the additional growth coming from the hamstring muscles that cross the hip. Magnetic resonance imaging scans, the gold standard for measuring changes in muscle size, were used to assess growth in the hamstrings. Two minutes of rest was taken between each set. Subjects in the study trained their hamstrings twice a week for 12 weeks, doing 5 sets of 10 reps in each workout.Įach rep lasted a total of 4 seconds – 2 seconds for the concentric (knee bending) and 2 seconds for the eccentric (knee straightening) phase of the exercise. When you use different groups of people to compare different exercises, the food they eat, the life they live, and the genes they were born with can skew the results.īut when the right leg is trained with one exercise, and the left leg is trained with another, genetics, lifestyle and diet are the same for both legs.
This meant each leg could be trained using either the seated or lying leg curl. But in this study, subjects trained one leg at a time. When you do seated or lying leg curls in a gym, both legs are normally trained together. To put that theory to the test, a team of Japanese scientists got a group of young men and women to do both exercises for three months.
LYING LEG CURL FREE
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LYING LEG CURL HOW TO
This is a quick guide to building muscle, which you can read online or keep as a PDF, that shows you exactly how to put on muscle. This, in theory at least, should lead to faster hamstring growth with the seated leg curl.įREE: The Muscle Building Cheat Sheet. In a lying leg curl, those same muscles are challenged at shorter lengths. Seated leg curls differ from lying leg curls in that the hamstring muscles crossing the hip are put in a stretched position. Seated vs Lying Leg Curl: What’s the Difference? Unlike the other hamstring muscles, the short head of biceps femoris doesn’t extend the hip, and only gets involved in flexing the knee. The semitendinosus, semimembranosus, and the long head of biceps femoris cross two joints (the hip and knee joints) rather than one. The majority of muscles making up the hamstring muscle group are biarticular, which means they cross two joints. On the back of your thigh, you’ve got three muscles:Ĭollectively, those three muscles are known as the hamstrings.
One of the more popular ways to work the hamstrings is with an isolation exercise like the leg curl, which you can do in a seated, lying or standing position.īut which leg curl variation works best when it comes to making your hamstrings grow? The Hamstring Muscle Group If you want to maximize growth in the hamstrings, you’ll need exercises that train them directly. While the hamstrings are involved in compound lifts like the barbell squat and leg press, their contribution is relatively small.
What’s the fastest way to make your hamstrings grow? The seated or lying leg curl?
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