A leg curl would not be a good substitute because the purpose of the supine hip extension is to learn to fire your glutes without letting the hamstrings take over. That's one reason the leg curl portion is added in later programs. The supine hip extension focuses on the glutes. A leg curl would isolate the hamstrings without involving the glutes. Better substitutes would use more glute/hip extension and less hamstrings. Lifts like pullthroughs, RDLs and good mornings fall into that category, but you should be able to feel your glutes working and know how to control your lumbar spine before attempting any of those lifts.
If you were my client and you couldn't feel your glutes during a supine hip extension, I'd move back to something even more rudimentary to teach you what it feels like. Glute bridging on the floor as an isometric hold would be the starting place, making sure your feet are under your knees, weight is on your heels, and you have a posterior pelvic tilt. As you hold that position you should be able to distinguish your hamstrings from your glutes and figure out how to put the load in your glutes (rather than in your hamstrings or low back). I'd work up from there depending on your performance. Hip extensions can be done with your feet on a bench rather than a ball, with legs straight or knees bent (whichever seems to work best for you), and then we'd move to a standing position and introduce hip extension movements there. Waiter's bow is a good starting place for standing hip extension. Pullthroughs are also very effective if you can bend the hips without bending the spine.
It sounds like a lot, but all of that is simply teaching you to use your glutes. Unless you're in really bad physical condition that teaching would probably only take a couple of workouts to get through. Then we'd use one of the training movements as glute activation during the warm-up (just to remind you) and then use the big lifts in your workout.
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Lisa Holladay, CSCS
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