Vertical Swing

🎯 Hamstrings🏋️ DumbbellBeginnerCompoundGlutes (2°)Quadriceps (2°)Shoulders (2°)

How to do the vertical swing

  1. Allow the dumbbell to hang at arms length between your legs, holding it with both hands. Keep your back straight and your head up.
  2. Swing the dumbbell between your legs, flexing at the hips and bending the knees slightly.
  3. Powerfully reverse the motion by extending at the hips, knees, and ankles to propel yourself upward, swinging the dumbell over your head.
  4. As you land, absorb the impact through your legs and draw the dumbbell to your torso before the next repetition.

Muscles worked

The force comes from the hamstrings, which extend the hip and bend the knee, frequently at both joints in the same repetition.

A plyometric repetition is over before a slow contraction could contribute anything, so they have to produce that force immediately on contact.

Because more than one joint is moving, the work does not stay in one place: the glutes finish hip extension; the quadriceps straighten the knee and take load on the descent; the deltoids stabilise the shoulder and add force at the top of the range.

Every exercise for:HamstringsGlutesQuadricepsShoulders

How this movement works

The load travels toward you and several joints bend to bring it there. The arms finish work the back starts, so grip and elbow flexors sit in the path of every repetition: when people stall on a compound pull, it is more often the hands giving out than the primary muscle running out of force.

It is filed under plyometrics, which trains the stretch-shortening cycle: loaded fast, released immediately. Contact time matters more than volume, so these belong early in a session.

What you need

Dumbbells let each side work on its own, surfacing a strength difference between limbs that a barbell would quietly cover for, and leaving the wrist free to rotate through the movement.

Every exercise using:Dumbbell

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

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.

Related exercises

Photos: free-exercise-db — public domain (Unlicense) Full attribution →

ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.