Smith Machine Good Mornings

Muscles worked

The prime movers are the spinal erectors running either side of the lumbar spine, which hold the spine extended instead of letting it round under load.

Even with a single joint doing the moving, the muscle is not working alone — the hamstrings assist hip extension and slow the knee down.

Every exercise for:Lower backHamstrings

How this movement works

Everything happens at one joint. That gives you direct control over where the tension sits; the trade-off is that the muscle gets no help, so the load that feels hard here is a fraction of what a multi-joint version of the pattern would take. Slow, complete repetitions beat heavy ones.

It is filed under strength: produce force against resistance for a countable number of repetitions, and progress the resistance over time.

What you need

A Smith machine runs the bar on a fixed track. You never have to balance it, so you can chase the target muscle harder, but your joints have to accept the path the rails picked.

Every exercise using:Smith machine

These train the lower back too, using equipment this one does not:

• Stiff Leg Barbell Good Morningbarbell
• Supermanbody only
• Weighted Ball Hyperextensionexercise ball
• Dumbbell Dead Liftsdumbbell
• Hyperextensionsbench