Reverse Nordics: the BEST Quad Exercise?
There’s no shortage of different exercises you can do to train your quads.
One of them, though, shines through all the others.
The exercise I am referring to is the reverse nordic.
So, the aim of this article is to explain why that is and how to perform this exercise.
Reverse nordic demo & how to:
To perform this exercise, follow these steps:
Start out on both knees with an upright posture and your hips straight
You can have either your toes or shoelaces on the ground, whichever is more comfortable for you
Lean back slowly while keeping your hips straight
Don’t let your torso lean forward as you go back
Go back as far as you are able and pause briefly in this deepest point
Lift your body up by pressing your feet into the floor; maintain straightness in your hips
NOTE: This exercise is decently advanced. If you find this too difficult for where you’re at now, then click here for a set of progression exercises to work toward this.
Why reverse nordics are so good:
There’s three key features to this exercise that makes it so great.
They are as follows:
1) It loads the quads in a stretched position
There’s more and more research coming out now to show that when you train a muscle in a more stretched position more muscle growth tends to occur.
This has even been shown in the quadriceps specifically.
A 2022 randomized control trial split subjects into four groups, and each group performed the leg extension exercise in one of the following ways:
full range of motion
partial range of motion using the more stretched position of the muscle
partial range of motion using the more contracted/shortened position of the muscle
and a varied group, that included a daily alteration of the previous three rep styles.
At the end of the study, they found that subjects performing partial reps in the stretched position experienced greater muscle growth than all other groups, including the full range of motion group (although, 1RM changes were similar between full ROM and partial ROM).
this effect has also been shown in the hamstrings, calves, and the triceps.
2) It trains knee extension AND hip flexion
One of the muscles of your quadriceps, the rectus femoris, crosses not just the knee joint but the hip joint as well.
Why does this matter?
It means this muscle contributes not just to extending your knee but also to flexing your hip as well (bringing your knee closer to your chest, opposite what the glutes do).
This can be seen in the following image:
You’ll notice that it’s not just the muscles of the knee holding your body up, the muscles of the hip also have to contract to hold your torso up and prevent it from falling back.
As a result, both ends of the rectus femoris (a muscle of the quadriceps) get trained.
3) It’s a knee flexion only movement
As previously mentioned, the rectus femoris crosses the knee AND the hip joint.
As a result, it isn’t very active during squat or lunge patterns.
This is because as it lengthens near knee it shortens near the hip.
This results in very little net change in muscle length during the movement, which does not allow it to contribute.
[source]
So, by having a movement such as this one in your program, you can guarantee you will effectively train the entirety of the quadriceps.
