Hamstring Hypertrophy: Every Day For Optimal Results?

Can’t get enough of leg day? Can You Train Those Hamstrings Every Single Day for Maximum Growth? Let’s Unravel the Mystery Behind Massive Legs and Peak Athletic Performance. Here’s What You’ve Been Itching to Know!

The hamstrings are a large muscle group that doesn’t recover quickly and is sensitive to injuries. That means hamstring workouts take at least 2-3 days to fully recover from. Training hamstrings every day is going to be detrimental to muscle growth and strength and raises injury risk.

Why is more not better and what can you do to optimize the growth of your hamstrings? Keep reading below to find out. 

Can You Train Hamstrings Every Day for Optimal Muscle Growth?

Introduction

Maintaining muscle mass and central nervous system control requires using your muscles daily. However, when it comes to training and hypertrophy, pushing a muscle beyond its normal limits is essential to gain muscle growth and strength.

Understanding the recovery process after training is key to optimizing your hamstring workouts for better results and injury prevention.

Muscle Growth and Recovery

Contrary to popular belief, muscle growth doesn’t occur during weightlifting; it happens afterward. When you challenge your muscles, they experience micro-tears, initiating a repair process that leads to muscle growth.

This repair involves fusing muscle fibers with new proteins, adding mass and strength to the muscle. The recovery period depends on various factors such as age, gender, diet, sleep, activity levels, and hormones.

Yes, a muscle might look bigger after a good training session but this is temporary. It’s just extra blood being sent to the muscle which gives it a fuller appearance. 

Recovery Time for Hamstrings

Hamstrings are a large muscle group, which means they take longer to recover than smaller muscles. Additionally, hamstring exercises often involve compound movements that engage a significant amount of muscle mass.

Consequently, hamstring workouts demand more recovery time. On average, it takes about 24 hours for a light hamstring workout to recover, while more intense sessions may require 2 to 3 days or longer. I’ve been sore for 5 days after a hamstring session before, wouldn’t recommend it.

How quickly your body recovers not only depends on training intensity, it also depends on; age, gender, diet, sleep, other activity, and hormone levels. 

Training again before complete recovery can be counterproductive and should be avoided. That means you can’t train your hardest every day and expect your hamstrings to keep growing. You’re adding muscle damage on top of damage. You might even regress training your hamstrings every day.

Optimizing Hamstring Workouts

The frequency and intensity of your hamstring workouts play a crucial role in recovery. Heavy compound movements like barbell deadlifts induce more fatigue and require longer recovery periods compared to lightweight leg curls.

So if you want to train more often, using isolation exercises like leg curls is going to be better since you can recover quicker from those. that’s because you put less stress on the rest of your body which frees up recovery capacity for the hamstring.

For most individuals, training hamstrings twice a week is sufficient, especially when combined with other leg exercises like squats and deadlifts.

Preventing Injuries

Due to their size and susceptibility to injuries in athletic situations, it’s vital to take precautions when training hamstrings. Giving them ample time to recover (at least two days between sessions) can reduce the risk of injuries.

If you participate in sports that heavily stress the hamstrings, closely monitor your recovery to avoid overexertion. Hamstring injuries are a common way to be on the sidelines for a while.

Potential Problems Training Hamstrings Every day

If you want to train every day, you can’t train your hamstrings all that hard since they have to recover fully within 24 hours. While you can do it, you’ll run into some problems.

The Facts:

1. Recovery and Intensity: Recovery needs largely depends on the intensity of hamstring training. Training with high intensity every day can lead to certain injuries and might not yield the desired results. How well you recover depends on many factors like: diet, sleep, gender, hormone balance, etc.
2. Effectiveness of Frequency: Training hamstrings two times a week with moderate to high intensity is more effective than performing light workouts daily, even if you could sustain it. Hypertrophy is better when training close to failure.

The Problems with Daily Hamstring Training:

1. Risk of Weakening: Inadequate recovery prevents muscles from producing maximum force, potentially leading to a decrease in strength over the long term.
2. Joint and Tendon Pain: Tendons and joints receive less blood flow than muscles, resulting in longer recovery times. Daily training without breaks can strain these areas, leading to pain and potential injuries.
3. Negative Impact on Other Training: Daily hamstring training leaves you with less time, energy, and recovery capacity for other muscle groups, hindering overall training progress. If all you care about is your hamstrings, just train those and forget the rest. They’ll recover faster and you can train then more often, resulting in more growth.

Conclusion

Understanding the recovery process and optimizing your hamstring workouts can lead to more significant muscle growth and reduce the risk of injuries. By giving your hamstrings sufficient time to recover (about 2-3 days in between), you can achieve better results and improve overall athletic performance.

Training hamstrings two to three times a week with higher intensity is a more sustainable and effective approach for muscle growth and overall development.

By incorporating moderate to high-intensity workouts and allowing sufficient recovery between sessions, you can maximize muscle gains while minimizing the risk of injury.

Is Training Hamstrings Everyday Good For Strength Gains?

For growing a muscle, more volume is often the right way to go. However, as we saw above, there are limits to that. But what about strength?

As you can read above, muscles need time to recover. Muscles grow because your body repairs the torn muscle fibers and adds new proteins to ‘glue’ the ends back together. If you put your hamstrings through another hard workout, you are potentially tearing muscle fibers that haven’t been fully repaired yet + more which means the recovery will take longer. 

If the hamstrings arent really recovered yet, your body won’t use all the muscle fibers for maximum force production. That means you’ll be able to push slightly less weight every time you train without recovering properly.

That means you might be undoing recovery work your body hadn’t finished yet and setting yourself back. If you start the next workout when a muscle is fully recovered, you can use more force and intensity which means more muscle tearing and more growth. How long that takes is different for everyone but it’s probably not 24 hours later. (Unless you’re using performance-enhancing drugs) 

On top of that, you dramatically increase the risk of injury by training the same muscle hard every day. If you get injured, this will set you back more than getting in that extra workout it is worth (which isn’t actually much). 

Especially with hamstring workouts, you often do heavy compound exercises like squats and deadlifts. These exercises work the hamstrings hard but also use a lot of muscles in the rest of the body. That includes many stabilizing muscles. If those stabilizing muscles are not fully recovered and you put another heavy load on them, you probably won’t be able to perform the exercise with good form. This dramatically increases the injury risk. 

And once you get injured, training becomes much more difficult and you will have trouble gaining meaningful amounts of strength until you’re recovered. 

How do muscles grow? 

How to Improve Hamstrings Muscle Growth?

Of course, you still want all the muscle gains and you want them now. What can you do to optimize your hamstring workouts and get the most out of them?

There are two parts to this tricep growth equation: During your workout and after. 

During the workout

While working out, that’s your chance to signal your body that it has to grow muscle. Here are some ways you can do this best. 

• Use the right intensity (Sets, repetitions, and weight). 
• Aim to do about 12 challenging sets per week for optimal muscle growth you can recover from. This means with exercises directly targeting the hamstrings either compound or isolation exercises. Warmup sets don’t count. If you’re just starting out, aim for about 4 heavy sets per workout for the first few weeks. Increase to 6 after two or three weeks. 
• Use two or three different hamstring exercises per workout. 
• Use progressive overload. (Increase weight or repetitions every workout)
• Use different exercises that target different parts of the hamstrings(it’s not just one muscle)
• Use a mix of heavy weight/low repetitions and light(er) weight/high repetitions. 
• Don’t rest too long between sets. Muscle growth is optimal with 30-90 seconds rest between sets. On heavy sets up to 2 minutes is OK. 
• Stop 2 repetitions before failure. If you have a lot more left, do more reps or increase the weight. If you can’t make the reps, reduce the weight. 

Check out Renaissance periodization for very good research on optimal training volume. 

It’s a good idea to mix up the workouts in reps and weight. Doing one workout with heavy weights but lower (5-8) repetitions and another workout with lower weights but higher repetitions (8-15) helps provide different training impulses to the muscles and also makes it a bit easier to recover. The heavy workout can focus on compound lifts like squats and deadlifts while the lighter workout can focus on leg extensions, lunges, etc. 

After The workout

As you can read above, the actual growth of the muscle happens in the 1-3 days after the workout. So after you gave your body the signal to repair the hamstrings, now it’s time to give your body the best chance to actually do this. Muscle recovery is a very complicated topic and not possible to fit into a few paragraphs. On top of that, everyone is different and has different needs for recovery. That said, here are some general pointers that help everyone recover. 

• Take enough time off between working out the hamstrings: As you can see above, 2 workouts spaced out evenly throughout the week is best. 
• Sleep more: Most recovery happens during sleep. Sleeping more means your body has more time to work. 
• Eat enough calories: To gain muscle, you’ll have to eat slightly more calories than you use during the day. A 200 calorie surplus is a good place to start. 
• Eat enough protein: Muscle is mostly made up of protein. Giving your body enough means there is more building material available for repairs. There is no need to go overboard, aim for +-1.6 grams of protein per kilo of body weight.
• Make sure to get enough micronutrients: The body doesn’t only use macronutrients to work and grow. It’s best to eat a complete nutrient dense diet but supplements are a good option too (but not a replacement for healthy foods). 

If you notice fatigue and can’t recover quickly enough, adjusting the factors above doesn’t help and you absolutely want to focus on growing your hamstrings, consider reducing training other body parts. You body has only so much capacity to recover, no matter how good the circumstances. Reducing the training of other body parts means there is more capacity to recover the hamstrings. 

Suggested: How to maximize muscle recovery

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