Tips on Doing Good Mornings:

1.) Pull the shoulder blades back and create a shelf for the bar on your traps (or under if you’re doing low-bar good mornings). This creates a stable base and keeps your back safe during the movement, allowing you to transfer load effectively to your hamstrings.

2.) Arch your lower back and get into anterior pelvic tilt. This pre-stretches your hamstrings and makes sure they become the limiting factor and thus target of this exercise. If your back rounds, it both endangers your spine and takes the tension off the hams, making this more of a spinal erector exercise than the hamstring exercise it’s usually supposed to be.

3.) Fix your knee joints in place at just shy of lockout. If you lock out your knees fully, this will usually lead to considerable discomfort which, while perhaps not always contributing to injury risk, is at the very least needless. And the injury risk, especially in chronic wear and tear via knee shear, is not zero if you lock your knees in this movement. But if you give your knees too much bend at any part of the movement, the hamstrings shorten and lose contribution to the movement, which is then mostly done via the glutes. If you want hams as the target, keep your knee just slightly bent, maybe at a 160 degree angle or so.

4.) Descend not by focusing on bending over, but on pushing your butt back. Keep your chest up as much as you can during this time to keep the back arched. By moving your but back and keeping your chest up as much as you can, you’ll naturally bend at the hips and not at the waist. The latter takes tension off of the hams. Remember that your knees will REALLY want to bend the lower you go, so keep them in place and resist the bending! At a certain depth, this resistance will become painful for your hams, and that’s a good thing because it means they are being stretched under load and thus signaled to grow!

5.) Descend until either the pain in your hams becomes pretty notable or until your back begins to lose its arch. Usually it should be the hams that limit you, and if it’s the back, it might be too much weight for effective ham training. Weight for GMS should be light enough so that your hams, rather than your back, are a limiting factor. Remember that there’s not a bonus system for ever more hamstring pain… just get them a bit tingly and then slowly come back up while still keeping your knees only slightly bent. The range of motion you get depends very much on your personal flexibility and mobility. If you try to hit an arbitrary depth too high of your true abilities, you simply won’t stretch the hams enough and not grow much. On the other hand, if you go too low, you’ll put yourself at risk of injury for no reason. There’s no GM Olympics, so just do the movement to your ROM and you’ll slowly get more flexible with time… no need to compete with anyone on depth!

6.) During the descent and much of the ascent, you’ll have much of your weight in your mid-foot and heels, which usually places that much more tension on the hams.

7.) You can totally wear a belt if you’d like, and some bracing (taking in lots of air and holding it on the eccentric and the bottom half of the concentric) can be done to keep your back tight.

8.) Stay connected with your hams and your technique. GMs are one of those exercises that, if you don’t execute VERY well, you’ll simply get almost nothing out of it. And your body will always try to fight you by trying to round the back or bend the knees, so it’s always going to be an effort to do these right.