Thought process for a dealing with a training dilemma

Training Q&A [Moderated]
1

This is an admittedly unfocused question that I’m not sure you’ll be able to answer, but I am at least interested in your thought process in addressing situations like this.

I don’t do hamstring isolation stuff very often, but started doing it some months back as prescribed in the BB template. I’ve alternated between the standing and seated versions (whichever one was available), but a couple of weeks I found the old traditional prone version was the only one available. I did it, and it felt awful. Comparatively I was way weaker than in the other variations, but it also felt like there was a lot more of feeling of a red flag in my left hammy in which I’ve got a long (pre-lifting) history of tears. I tried it again this week hoping to see some improvement and it was just as terrible. I see two approaches:

  1. You’re clearly weak in this exercise. Bringing up this specific weakness will likely transfer better to whatever advantages doing direct hamstring work is supposed to provide than will continuing to work on variations you’re already better at and have less room for improvement in.

  2. It’s a hamstring curl. The transferability of any improvement you make in this variation is going to be small and the risk of injury just isn’t worth it. It’s simply not that important to do something that feels off when other variations that feel better are available.

I’ve increasingly shifted my approach to training over the past 18 months more towards the BBM philosophy with much more judicious and limited use of high RPE sets and less movement specialization. The result is I feel less banged up than I’ve felt for a decade and done this with no loss in strength in the primary lifts, and fewer obvious weaknesses. This tells me to lean towards option 1, but it’s just a hamstring curl. For someone who is only an athlete these days in my memory (now old enough to be an inductee into our Alma Mater’s HoF. Go Dogs!) doing shit that hurts just seems stupid if there are other non-painful/worrying options.

I know there is no right answer, but what is your thought process with stuff like this?

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Limie,

Thank you for the thoughtful post. In general, I think direct hamstring work is direct hamstring work is direct hamstring work. I don’t think it’s likely that a specific variation will drive more (or less) results outside of personal preferences, trainability, etc. That said, I think varying the approach over the training year seems like a good hedge towards being well-rounded. If someone feels sensitivity with a particular movement, reducing the load and, perhaps additionally, altering the tempo, rom, etc. to a place where they can tolerate it would be my go-to.

There are limits to this, of course. People don’t need to do everything to train for life. For example, not everyone needs to do single-leg squats, but I’d train some unilateral lower body stuff for sure.

Hope this helps.

-Jordan

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