Single leg hypers are my favorite:
I'm not fond of hip thrusts because it's just awkward and I can hit my glutes harder in my single leg RDLs, and I have not ever grown fond of GHRs, and I have not tried reverse hypers (i'm sure I would love them), so my opinion is not completely unbiased, but THESE HIT YOUR HAMSTRINGS SO FUCKING HARD. DO THEM.
The other benefit is that they won't fatigue you centrally as much as stiff-legged DLs, or sprinting, or hip thrusts, since it's basically an isolation exercise, but one that also has good specificity to sprinting and single leg jumping.
Yes Lowrey claimed them to be a secret exercise in his program. I think they could be a secret exercise for SPRINTING, I wonder if T0dday knows anything about famous sprinters swearing by this exercise, I doubt it but I would suspect that if you gave two groups of unsprint-trained athletes stiff legged deadlifts and squats, or single leg hypers and squats at the same intensity, you'd find higher vertical jumps and and faster sprint times in the group that did single leg hypers. I swear doing these a lot last year made me feel incredibly bouncy and light for my sprints.
I also want beast hamstrings, badly, and I plan to use this machine until I can lift two 45lb plates with one leg, then just keep going obviously.
I think the best method in this exercise is to hold a weight with arms extended at the bottom of the ROM, and attempt to lift it outwards away from the machine AND upwards at the same time towards the chest, curling the weight with the arms, rather than holding it statically and just lifting it upwards, to maximally innervate the hamstrings group. Slowly descending, arms relax and extend again, until the next rep where I stretch the hamstring a little then lift upwards with a nice amortization. It's way too hard to lift it all the way up above the head with a heavy weight, that also seems to hit the back a lot more. The potentiation is nice too.
When going very very heavy, it's impossible to lift outwards; instead you will just lift it up towards the chest. It is critical to flex and unflex the arms at the top and bottom of the ROM respectively, as the mild acceleration resulting from doing so increases the forces the hamstrings have to produce to reverse direction, just like with kettlebell swings, thus training eccentric overload or w/e you call it. It's probably dangerous to lift too heavy since the forces on the tendons at the back of the knee are unparalleled by any other exercise except stiff legged deadlifts with the knees locked, which no one does obviously.
Seriously, do them. I haven't tried reverse hypers, but I'd suspect you would get better results with regular hypers because you can initiate a much stronger stretch-reflex at the bottom of the ROM and manipulate the positioning of your arms to lessen or increase the load on the hamstrings. It's of course viewed as a supplementary exercise, but I wonder what results sprint athletes and high jumpers could have if they treated it as a primary strength exercise and trained it 3-5 times a week until they could lift upwards of their own bodyweight with one leg.
