Ceejbot

Here’s another way to do glute-ham raises without a dedicated gizmo:

Set the bar on your gym’s otherwise nearly-useless Smith machine to the lowest rung.

Load it up with enough weight on each side that it isn’t going to budge (2 or 3 plates should be more than enough).

Kneel with the backs of your heels against the bar. If your gym has one of those otherwise-useless padded collars for bars, you could use it to give your heels something cushy to press against. You might also want to stick a mat under your knees.

Fire up that posterior chain and slowly unbend your knees. Or start at the bottom and bend your knees while keeping everything else solid and straight. Or, as I do it: shove up from the bottom of a pushup and hope that’s enough of a help that the glutes can pull me the rest of the way up, because holy heck, this is a tough one. Max contraction required right from the start. Yeah, I suck at this.

My gym doesn’t have a glute-ham raise machine. But what it does have is a seated calf raise machine, and if you have one of those you can improvise a glute-ham developer. Here’s how.

You load up the stem on the calf raise thing with plates until it’s not going to budge for anything. Stick a box or a stool in front of the machine. Then you kneel on the seat of the machine with your heels braced against the spot where your knees would normally be pressing. Lock down, fire up your glutes, and head on down. Catch yourself using the box and push against it to get yourself going on the way up again.

Man oh man oh man does this exercise kick my ass.

You know, literally.