What muscles does the slider hamstring curl work?

The hamstrings, working as knee benders to resist your legs straightening. Behind that, your glutes are holding the bridge up and your abs are keeping your trunk straight, and neither of those jobs involves anything moving. Your calves take a share too, because the muscle at the top of the calf crosses the back of the knee as well as the ankle.

Is a slider curl as good as a Nordic hamstring curl?

Nobody has compared them, so we cannot tell you. What we can tell you is that the Nordic has an injury-rate record across 8459 athletes and measurements of what it does to the muscle, and the slider curl has neither. They are the same kind of work. Only one of them has been checked.

My hamstrings cramp every set. What do I change?

Cramping is the most common complaint about this exercise, and it usually means the range is more than the position can currently hold. Shorten the slide and let your hips down between reps. If it happens on a plain glute bridge as well, that is a different problem with a different answer.

Why do my hips drop as my legs straighten?

Because that is the hardest point of the rep. The further your heels travel, the more of your body is out in front of your hips and the more there is to hold up. Ending the slide sooner keeps the load where you wanted it.

Am I supposed to use my hands?

For the reset, yes. The steps have you pulling your heels back in with your hands, which means the exercise as written has a lowering phase and no lifting phase. Pushing through your arms during the slide out is a different matter, and it takes weight off the legs.

Can I do this without sliding discs?

Yes. Your heels need something they can glide on and nothing more than that. A folded hand towel handles wood or tile. On carpet, the smooth side of a plastic lid works better than fabric does.

The steps say 3 to 5 seconds for the slide out and there is nothing established beyond that. Treat the count as the exercise. If reps are finishing quicker than that, the position is running away from you rather than being lowered.

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Bodyweight · intermediate · upper legs

Slow eccentric slider hamstring curl

Also called Sliding leg curl, Slider hamstring curl, Supine sliding leg curl, Valslide hamstring curl, Towel hamstring curl.

The short answer

You lie on your back with your heels on sliding discs, push your hips up into a bridge, then let your heels travel away from you over 3 to 5 seconds while the hips stay up. Your hamstrings do the work, and they do it as knee benders resisting your legs straightening, not as hip extenders. Your glutes hold the bridge and your abs hold your trunk in line. The version in the steps has you resetting with your hands, which means there is no lifting half at all: the slow part is the whole exercise.

How to do it

Step oneLie on your back with your heels on slider discs and your arms flat on the ground.
Step twoDrive your hips upward into a bridge position by contracting your glutes.
Step threeSlowly slide both heels away from your body, extending your legs over a count of 3-5 seconds.
Step fourOnce fully extended, use your hands to reset to the curled position.

What usually goes wrong

Each starts with what you would notice.

Your hips sink toward the floor as your heels get further away.

WhyThe bridge is what keeps your hamstrings loaded, and once your backside touches down the floor is holding you instead of your legs. It tends to happen in the last third of the slide, which is also the part with the most tension in it.

FixFinish the slide early, at whatever distance still lets you hold the bridge, and keep driving your hips upward through the whole descent rather than only at the start. How far your heels went is not the measure. Whether your hips stayed up is.

Your hamstrings cramp hard partway through the first set.

WhyThis is the most common report on this exercise. The hamstrings are being asked for a long, slow effort in a position most people have never trained, and they object. It is worth separating from the same complaint on a glute bridge, where cramping usually means the hamstrings took over a job that belonged to the glutes. Here they are meant to be doing it.

FixCut the range down so your heels stop well short of full extension, and let your hips down for a moment between reps instead of holding the bridge continuously. Both make the set finishable while the position becomes familiar.

Your hands and arms are pushing into the floor as the heels go out.

WhyPressing down through your arms takes some of your weight off the working legs, so the slide gets easier without getting shorter. The catalog steps do have you using your hands, and that is for pulling your heels back in at the end, not for the descent.

FixTurn your palms up, or fold your arms across your chest, for the slide itself, and put your hands back down only to reset. If the slide will not happen without a push, shorten it until it will.

The heels shoot out and the rep is over in a second.

WhyPast a certain knee angle your legs will finish straightening on their own, and speed is what removes the load rather than what proves it.

FixCount the descent out. The steps say 3 to 5 seconds, and that count is the exercise rather than a detail attached to it. A few reps at that count is a set. A dozen quick ones is a slide.

Slider curl or Nordic hamstring curl

Mechanically these are cousins. Both bend the knee against your own bodyweight, both put the effort into the lowering, and both keep the hip fairly open while they do it. If nobody is around to hold your ankles for a Nordic, this is doing a similar kind of work.

What is not similar is how much is known about them. The Nordic hamstring curl is one of the most studied exercises in sport. Pooling 15 studies and 8459 athletes, adding it to an injury prevention program was associated with roughly half the rate of hamstring injuries, and it has been measured lengthening the fascicles in the biceps femoris and raising eccentric strength.

None of that has been measured on a slider curl. No trial has used it as the intervention, nobody has put a group under ultrasound before and after a block of it, and nobody has run the two against each other.

That is not a case against the exercise. It is a case for knowing which claim you are leaning on. If the goal is the specific thing the Nordic has evidence for, do the Nordic. If the goal is knee-bending hamstring work you can actually do on your living room floor, this is a sensible way to get it, and the claim stops there.

Bending the knee or hinging at the hip

Your hamstrings cross two joints, so there are two ways to train them. You can bend the knee, which is what this exercise does, or you can close and open the hip, which is what a Romanian deadlift does.

They are not interchangeable. When a lying leg curl was set against a stiff-legged deadlift in ten resistance-trained men, the leg curl produced greater activity in the lower part of the hamstring, on both the inner and the outer side. Work using recordings taken across the whole muscle has found the same theme in other pairs of exercises: where along the muscle the work lands depends on which joint is moving.

A week containing only hinges leaves part of the muscle underworked, and so does a week containing only curls. This exercise covers the knee-bending side. The Romanian deadlift covers the other one.

The claim on the label, checked

The description that ships with this exercise says the slow tempo maximizes hamstring strength and muscle development. We went looking for what that rests on and came back with nothing.

There is no published trial using slider hamstring curls as the training intervention and measuring strength or size. There is no ultrasound study of what a block of them does to the muscle. There is one recent recording study that included a supine sliding leg curl, and it was comparing previously injured athletes against uninjured ones rather than ranking exercises, so it settles nothing about how this sits against anything else.

What can be said is narrower and still useful. It is knee-bending hamstring work, done slowly, with your own bodyweight, on a floor you already have. That is a real thing to have available and it does not need a claim on top of it.

The other thing worth knowing is structural. The steps on file have you resetting with your hands, which would make this a lowering-only exercise, though our clip shows the heels being curled back in under their own power. Lowering-only work is legitimate, and it is also not what most people picture when they read that an exercise builds a muscle.

Expect it to leave you sore, more than the effort during the set suggests. Lowering under load is the version of muscle work that produces the most soreness, and it usually peaks a day or two afterward. Sore is normal. If something hurts and keeps hurting, that is a question for a physiotherapist.

What it is for

The slow eccentric slider hamstring curl uses slider discs to eccentrically load the hamstrings by slowly extending the legs from a glute bridge position. The slow tempo during the lengthening phase maximizes hamstring strength and muscle development.

Questions people ask

What muscles does the slider hamstring curl work?: The hamstrings, working as knee benders to resist your legs straightening. Behind that, your glutes are holding the bridge up and your abs are keeping your trunk straight, and neither of those jobs involves anything moving. Your calves take a share too, because the muscle at the top of the calf crosses the back of the knee as well as the ankle.
Is a slider curl as good as a Nordic hamstring curl?: Nobody has compared them, so we cannot tell you. What we can tell you is that the Nordic has an injury-rate record across 8459 athletes and measurements of what it does to the muscle, and the slider curl has neither. They are the same kind of work. Only one of them has been checked.
My hamstrings cramp every set. What do I change?: Cramping is the most common complaint about this exercise, and it usually means the range is more than the position can currently hold. Shorten the slide and let your hips down between reps. If it happens on a plain glute bridge as well, that is a different problem with a different answer.
Why do my hips drop as my legs straighten?: Because that is the hardest point of the rep. The further your heels travel, the more of your body is out in front of your hips and the more there is to hold up. Ending the slide sooner keeps the load where you wanted it.
Am I supposed to use my hands?: For the reset, yes. The steps have you pulling your heels back in with your hands, which means the exercise as written has a lowering phase and no lifting phase. Pushing through your arms during the slide out is a different matter, and it takes weight off the legs.
Can I do this without sliding discs?: Yes. Your heels need something they can glide on and nothing more than that. A folded hand towel handles wood or tile. On carpet, the smooth side of a plastic lid works better than fabric does.
How slow is slow?: The steps say 3 to 5 seconds for the slide out and there is nothing established beyond that. Treat the count as the exercise. If reps are finishing quicker than that, the position is running away from you rather than being lowered.