reckonerChest-supported dumbbell row
Lie face down on an incline bench and row two dumbbells up. The bench holds your torso, so nothing about the set depends on how long your lower back can hold a hinge, which is usually what decides how much rowing you get done.
Chest stays down, pull the elbows back.
- Pattern
- Horizontal pull
- Trains
- Upper back, rear delts, lats
- Kit
- Dumbbell, incline bench
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 6 to 10 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Low
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the bench at a low incline
Somewhere around thirty to forty-five degrees, high enough that the dumbbells clear the floor at the bottom and low enough that your chest is properly supported. Face down, chin off the top of the pad.
Lie down and let the arms hang
Chest flat on the pad, feet braced on the floor or the frame, dumbbells hanging straight down with the shoulder blades reaching forward. Chest stays down, which is the cue on your wrist.
Pull the elbows back past your ribs
Drive both elbows up and back and squeeze the shoulder blades together at the top. Hold there for a beat. Because you cannot move your torso, whatever the weight does now is what your back did.
Lower until the arms are straight
Let the dumbbells travel all the way back down and the blades open again. Full range beats a shortened one on every pooled outcome1, and the pad makes cutting it obvious rather than easy.
What goes wrong
Peeling the chest off the pad
The upper body lifts to finish the rep, which puts the hinge straight back in and undoes the reason you chose this row. If the chest leaves the pad, the dumbbells are too heavy.
Setting the bench too upright
A steep incline turns it into a shrug with a very short range, and a bench too low leaves the dumbbells hitting the floor. Set it once, note where the pin was, and use the same hole every time.
Pulling to the armpits
Flaring the elbows wide and rowing high moves the work onto the rear shoulders and out of the lats. That is a real exercise, but it is not this one, and picking it by accident means your back gets less than the log says.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 20 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 6 at 20 kg | More reps 6 → 7 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 4 x 7 at 20 kg | More reps 7 → 8 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 4 x 8 at 20 kg | 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. |
| 4 | 4 x 9 at 20 kg | 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. |
| 5 | 4 x 10 at 20 kg | 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 10 at 20 kg | Load up 20 kg → 22.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 22.5 kg and reps reset to six. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four sets. |
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
Is this as good as a bent-over row?
For the back it does the same job. What it removes is the lower back cost, which is where a standing bent-over row spends most of its price2. What you give up is the hinge itself, which is real training if that is what you wanted from a row.
Why do I get fewer reps than on a free row?
Because none of them are coming from your hips. On a free row a small rise of the torso adds height to a rep that has run out, and the pad will not let you do that. The number is lower and it is the honest one.
Should my head hang off the top of the bench?
Yes, or at least your chin should. Resting your face on the pad forces the neck into extension for the whole set and makes it hard to keep the chest pinned where it belongs.
Similar movements
Reckoner eases the load first when this lift stalls, and offers one of these only if it stalls again after that. A lift already as light as your kit goes has no load left to ease, so the offer comes straight away. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Wolf and colleagues, International Journal of Strength and Conditioning, 2023. Partial vs full range of motion resistance training: a systematic review and meta-analysis a meta-analysis reporting a trivial standardized mean difference of 0.12 in favor of full range training, with every outcome favoring full range but all effects between trivial and small, and a subgroup suggesting partials held at long muscle lengths may match or beat full range for size
- Fenwick, Brown and McGill, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2009. Comparison of different rowing exercises: trunk muscle activation and lumbar spine motion, load, and stiffness seven men instrumented through three rows, with the inverted row producing the highest latissimus dorsi, upper back and hip extensor activation of the three and the lowest measured compression at the fourth and fifth lumbar joint at 2339 newtons, against 2457 for a standing one-armed cable row and 3576 for a standing bent-over row