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The Best Posterior Chain Exercises for Women

movement muscle building posterior chain strength

Trying to build your beautiful body and feeling like you’re making no progress? Here are the best posterior chain exercises for women!

By prioritising the posterior chain, you’re ensuring maximal strength and muscle growth – assuming you’re eating plenty of protein and food to support your body along the way.

What is the Posterior Chain?

The Posterior Chain is a group of muscle that make you extremely strong – the hamstrings, back, glutes and abdominal muscles. To learn more about that, check out my article What is The Posterior Chain, and Why Does It Matter?

The point of this article is to share the best posterior chain exercises so you can get strong, ASAP. I will include the steps to strengthen it here, but you’ll find the more advanced exercises like the Reverse Hyper and the GHD in my article My Favourite Strength Exercises By Louie Simmons, Adapted For Women

For now, we will look at a two step process;

Strengthen the individual muscles.
Work on the hinging movement, as this is what activates the posterior chain as one complete unit (ie, a chain).

Exercise Group 1: Glutes (Hip Thrust)

You want to start with the movement, not using too much weight, like a glute raise.

You can then progress to the hip thrust, starting with a low weight!

Exercise Group 2: Back

These exercises help you gain muscular control over your back muscles, which can be hard when you’re untrained. We tend to slump over a desk all day and our backs are really weak!

You start with a banded row;

Move on to a cable row,

and add in some lat pulldowns,

Now you have your back and glutes sorted, we can move on to your hamstrings

Exercise Group 3: Hamstrings

You can start with a simple seated leg curl,

Then add in a laying leg curl,

Exercise Group 4: Hip Hinge

The hip hinge is any movement which involves hinging, at the hip. First you want to learn how to hinge:

Then you want to work on single leg variations like the Single Leg Deadlift

Followed by a compound movement like the Deadlift;

Once you work through those exercises, you’ll be well on your way to a strong posterior chain!

If you're interested in checking out even more exercises for building a strong back, check out my article: Lesser-Known Back Exercises for an Amazing Feminine Physique.

Adding in squats, lunges, and more complex leg movements can be beneficial too, but they increase quad activation – so if posterior chain is your number one priority, you can leave them out for now.