reckonerBodyweight reverse lunge
Step back, drop the back knee, stand up on the front leg. Nothing in your hands, so the only load is you, and one leg is carrying most of it. That is what makes a bodyweight movement genuinely hard rather than a warm up you get through.
Step back, drop the back knee down.
- Pattern
- Lunge
- Trains
- Quads, glutes
- Kit
- Bodyweight
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 8 to 12 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- Nothing to add, so the sets climb instead
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Knee, hip
Muscles worked
How to do it
Stand tall with your feet under your hips
Hands on your hips or out in front of you as a counterweight. Look at a fixed point ahead of you and keep looking at it.
Step straight back
One clear step behind you, in line with the hip it came from. Stepping back and out to the side widens your base and makes the rep easier in a way that will not be there next week.
Step back, drop the back knee down
That is the cue on your wrist. The back knee comes down toward the floor until it is just off it. Front shin close to vertical, front heel planted.
Stand up on the front leg
Push through the front heel and bring the back foot home. The back toe is a kickstand for balance, not something to push off.
What goes wrong
Pushing off the back foot
If the back leg drives you up, the front leg is not being trained. It is the same fault a loaded reverse lunge has and it is easier to commit here, because with no weight in your hands nothing tells you the rep was easy. Stand up on the front heel.
Cutting the depth once you tire
The back knee should get close to the floor on the last rep as well as the first. A set that gets shallower as it goes is a set whose later reps are a different exercise, and the record cannot tell you that happened.
Filing it as a warm up because there is no weight
One leg is carrying your whole bodyweight, and the hip is doing more of it than most people assume. In a systematic review of gluteus maximus activation across sixteen studies, the traditional lunge cleared the review's very high threshold of 60 per cent of a maximal contraction1. When these get easy the honest answer is load rather than another thirty reps, and the library carries a vest version and a dumbbell version of this exact movement.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, 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 | 3 x 8 | More reps 8 → 9 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 3 x 9 | More reps 9 → 10 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 3 x 10 | More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 11 | More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 12 | Deload 40% of sets offFive 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. |
| 6 | 2 x 12 | One more set 2 → 4 setsYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7 and there is no weight left to add. When a lift runs out of load, the set is the increment, so it does four sets next week. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself 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
How do I make this harder without weights?
Slow the lowering down, pause with the back knee just off the floor, and stand up without any rock forward. When all three are comfortable, you want load, and the library has both a vest reverse lunge and a dumbbell reverse lunge with their own records.
Reverse lunge or forward lunge?
Reverse, if the choice is free. Stepping backward lets you find the floor with a foot that is unloaded, so the landing is something you control rather than something you absorb. It is also easier to stop a rep you have started badly.
Will Reckoner give me this with a knee restriction?
No. Knee and hip are both recorded against it, the same as the loaded versions. Declare either in setup and it comes out of your plan.
Similar movements
There is no load to ease on this lift, so Reckoner offers one of these the first time it stalls. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Krause Neto and colleagues, Journal of Sports Science and Medicine, 2020. Gluteus Maximus Activation during Common Strength and Hypertrophy Exercises: A Systematic Review a systematic review of sixteen studies reporting gluteus maximus activation as a share of maximal voluntary contraction, in which the step-up and its variations sat at the top of the list and the split squat, the lunge, the hip thrust variations and the conventional deadlift all cleared the review's very high threshold of 60 per cent