Starting Strength

even a complete rep. Glute/ham raises are hard at first, but get easier very quickly as the movement pattern and the trainee’s associated neuromuscular efficiency improve.
    The movement is performed in essentially the same way as a back extension until the spine reaches the full arched position, which must occur in a coordinated fashion or the timing will be off. The knees then kick in to finish raising the chest up all the way to vertical. The best cue for this is the chest: think about raising your chest up fast and hard, and the hamstrings, calves, and glutes will do their job at the right time. The hands are held either crossed on the chest, the easier way, or with fingers locked behind the head, the harder way because more mass is farther away from the hips. Glute/hams like to be done at higher reps; 10 to 15 for three to five sets works best.

    Figure 7-53. The glute/ham raise.

    In this exercise, you are lifting the part of your body that is in front of the pad with muscles located behind the pad, and the more mass there is in front of the pad, the harder the job is to do. Most glute/ham benches are adjustable between the front and back pads for this reason, and the difficulty of the movement can be adjusted accordingly. Set the front pad back far enough to ensure that your crotch clears the pad, for rather obvious reasons, and to make the exercise hard enough for you to get enough work out of it. But be careful about setting the back pad so far forward that the front pad is too close to your knees. This position does increase the difficulty, but it also dramatically increases the amount of shear force on the knees, which are, after all, only held together by the cruciate ligaments, the capsular ligaments, and muscular tension. More-advanced lifters can carry weight behind the neck or on the chest to increase the work if necessary. It is much better to add load with weight than with leverage in this exercise.
    When your thighs slide or roll down the pads, you have allowed allow your knees to bend before you have completed the back extension. Remember: anytime the knees bend, the hamstrings shorten. If you allow this to happen before you finish the back-extension phase of the movement, then 1) you have contracted the hamstrings without making them do any actual work, since they haven’t contributed to the lifting up of the torso, and 2) you have placed them in a position of partial contraction, where they cannot contribute a full contraction to the exercise after the back-extension phase has finished. Don’t let your knees slide down from the thigh pad before your chest is up and your hips are extended. This is the most common error people make, and it ruins the effect of the exercise. And for the same reason, do not do glute/ham raises on a bench constructed with rollers for the front pad.
    When you first start doing them, glute/ham raises may be very hard. Typically, an untrained person cannot do a complete rep all the way up to vertical. This is fine; just come up as high as you can for each rep of the set, even though that height will deteriorate as the set goes on. The exercise gets easier very fast, as mentioned before, primarily because you learn how to do it more efficiently very quickly. Within six or seven workouts, most people can perform at least one complete rep. When you can do several sets all the way up, add load after a warm-up set by holding a plate to your chest or a bar behind your neck.
     
    A good definition of “functional exercise” is a normal human movement that can be performed under a scalable, increasable load. By this definition, neither back extensions of any type nor sit-ups are functional exercises. Some people have trouble with them, taking the form of chronic back pain or a tendency to get repeated small back injuries. The normal function of all the muscles surrounding the spine is spinal stabilization, and the squat, press, and all pulling exercises provide plenty of work for these muscles by challenging their function along with those of the prime movers of the exercise. If you are an older lifter with a degree of the normal spinal degeneration that accompanies advancing age, you might decide that eccentric and concentric back work and flexion-based abdominal work cause more problems than they correct. If you are continually plagued with lower-back injuries, try eliminating all exercises involving spinal flexion and extension for a few weeks and see what happens to the