maratoolInchworm
How to do the inchworm
- Stand with your feet close together. Keeping your legs straight, stretch down and put your hands on the floor directly in front of you. This will be your starting position.
- Begin by walking your hands forward slowly, alternating your left and your right. As you do so, bend only at the hip, keeping your legs straight.
- Keep going until your body is parallel to the ground in a pushup position.
- Now, keep your hands in place and slowly take short steps with your feet, moving only a few inches at a time.
- Continue walking until your feet are by hour hands, keeping your legs straight as you do so.
Muscles worked
The muscles under tension are the hamstrings, which extend the hip and bend the knee, frequently at both joints in the same repetition.
A stretch loads them at the far end of the range they normally work in, so the position you hold is itself the resistance.
Every exercise for:Hamstrings
How this movement works
Several joints move together, so effort spreads across a chain rather than concentrating in one place. Coordination is part of the difficulty: the movement is only as good as its weakest link, and improving it often means fixing a position somewhere other than the muscle you meant to train.
It is filed under stretching, so the target is range of motion rather than force — a position you can settle into and breathe in, held long enough for the tissue to give.
What you need
No equipment at all. The resistance is your own bodyweight, so you progress by changing leverage, range or tempo rather than by adding plates — and you can do it anywhere.
Every exercise using:Body only
These train the hamstrings too, using equipment this one does not:
- Jefferson Squats with Barbellbarbell
- Kettlebell Dead Cleankettlebell
- Lying Leg Curl Machinemachine
- Stiff-Legged Dumbbell Deadliftdumbbell
- Ball Leg Curlexercise ball
Difficulty
Listed at beginner level: the pattern is simple enough to pick up without coaching, and a position that goes wrong mid-set is obvious enough to correct on the next repetition.
Of the 86 hamstrings exercises in this database, 37 are listed at beginner level.
Photos: free-exercise-db — public domain (Unlicense) Full attribution →
ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.