reckonerBarbell back squat
The lift that moves the most weight and costs the most to recover from. It trains the quads, the glutes, the adductors and the muscles that hold your spine where you put it, and there is no accessory that replaces it.
Brace the belly, knees track the toes.
- Pattern
- Squat
- Trains
- Quads, glutes, adductors, spinal erectors
- Kit
- Barbell, rack
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 5 to 8 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2.5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Bar
- 20 kg
- Skill
- Technical, worth coaching
- Recovery cost
- Very high
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Knee, lower back, hip, neck, shoulder
How to do it
Set the bar and take it out
Bar at roughly mid chest height in the rack. Get under it, squeeze your shoulder blades together so it sits on a shelf of muscle rather than on bone, stand it up, and take two steps back. No more.
Brace before you move
Breathe into your belly, not your chest, and tighten as though you are about to be pushed over. That breath is held for the whole rep and let go at the top.
Sit down between your feet
Break at the hips and knees together and go down until the crease of your hip is below the top of your knee, or as far as you can go with your back flat. Knees track out over your toes rather than falling in.
Stand up out of it
Drive the whole foot into the floor and push your back into the bar. Hips and shoulders rise together: if the hips shoot up first, the weight is heavier than the brace can hold.
What goes wrong
Cutting the depth as the weight goes up
A quarter squat with a big number on the bar is not progress, it is a different exercise every week. Reckoner adds weight from what you logged, so a shrinking range makes the whole record dishonest.
Knees collapsing inwards
Almost always the ankles or the set-up rather than weak glutes. Widen the stance a little, turn the toes out, and push the knees out on the way down as well as the way up.
Walking the bar halfway across the gym
Every step is a rep you paid for and did not log. Two steps back, get set, squat.
Squatting without the pins
Set the safety bars at the bottom of your range before the first rep. It is thirty seconds and it is the reason a missed squat is an anecdote rather than an injury.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 80 kg, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 x 5 at 80 kg | More reps 5 → 6 repsRPE 7.5 with room left in the range, so reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 4 x 6 at 80 kg | More reps 6 → 7 repsRPE 7.5 with room left in the range, so reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 4 x 7 at 80 kg | Deload 40% of sets offThree weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 4 | 2 x 7 at 80 kg | More reps 7 → 8 repsRPE 7.5 with room left in the range, so reps climb before the load does. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four sets. |
| 5 | 4 x 8 at 80 kg | Load up 80 kg → 82.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7.5, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 82.5 kg and reps reset to five. |
| 6 | 4 x 5 at 82.5 kg | More reps 5 → 6 repsRPE 7.5 with room left in the range, so reps climb before the load does. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running reckoner/engine.py when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
High bar or low bar?
Whichever one you can hold position under. Reckoner does not distinguish between the two, so pick one and stay with it: switching mid block makes the load record read as a stall that is not there.
How deep do I actually have to go?
To the depth you can hold with a flat back, and to the same depth every week. Consistency matters more to the engine than the last few centimetres.
My lower back is the problem. Will Reckoner still give me this?
No. Declare a lower back restriction in setup and this movement comes out of your plan entirely, along with everything else that loads the spine that way.
Similar movements
Reckoner will offer any of these when this lift stalls. None of them is written up yet.