reckonerClose-grip lat pull-down
A pull-down taken with the hands inside shoulder width and the palms facing away. It trains what the wide version trains. What a narrow grip buys you is a longer pull and, for most people, a slightly heavier one, and those are better reasons to run it than anything you have been told about hitting a different part of the lat.
Hands inside the shoulders, elbows down.
- Pattern
- Vertical pull
- Trains
- Lats, upper back, biceps
- Kit
- Machine lat pulldown
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 6 to 10 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Low
Muscles worked
How to do it
Lock your legs under the pad
Set the thigh pad down until your legs are pinned. If your hips lift off the seat as the bar reaches your chest, the pad is too high or the weight is too heavy, and both are worth fixing before the second rep.
Take the bar inside your shoulders, palms away
About a hand's width either side of the middle of the bar, close enough that your forearms sit roughly vertical at the bottom. Keep the palms facing away. Measured against a supinated grip at two widths, a pronated grip produced greater latissimus dorsi activity, and the width itself changed nothing2.
Set the chest and lean back a few degrees
Chest tall, a small backward lean from the hips, then hold that angle. The lean is a position you set once and keep. It is not something that grows as the set gets hard.
Pull the elbows down to your ribs
Hands inside the shoulders, elbows down, which is the cue on your wrist. Drive the points of the elbows towards your back pockets and let the bar arrive at your upper chest as a consequence of that.
Let the arms go straight again
All the way up, until the elbows are straight and the shoulder blades rise with the bar. That top position is where the lat is longest, and it is the part of the range people quietly delete once the stack gets heavy.
What goes wrong
Picking a grip to change which part of the lat works
Grip width is the most argued detail on this machine and close to the least important one. Fifteen trained men pulled narrow, medium and wide at their six repetition maximum, and latissimus dorsi, trapezius and infraspinatus activity came out similar across all three1. Pick the width your shoulders and elbows are happy in.
Turning it into a row
The lean grows, the chest chases the bar, and by the last rep you are seated rowing on a high pulley. The problem is not that rows are bad. It is that your week already has rows in it, and this movement is here to load the pull from overhead.
Hauling with the hands
A close grip puts the forearms in a strong position, and the arms will happily take the set off the lat. If the inside of your elbow is the only thing that fails, loosen the grip, keep the wrists straight and lead with the elbow.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 45 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 45 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 45 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 45 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 45 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 45 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 45 kg | Load up 45 kg → 50 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 5 kg to 50 kg. The weight went up, so the reps come down to six. You are now working 6 to 10. 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 a close grip better than a wide grip for a wider back?
There is no good evidence that it is. Across narrow, medium and wide grips at one to two times the width of the shoulders, activation of the lat was similar, and the narrow and medium grips allowed a heavier six repetition maximum than the wide one1. Run whichever grip lets you pull well and hold the top of the rep.
Close grip or neutral grip?
A close grip here means the palms face away. A neutral grip means they face each other. Palms away is the one with the measured advantage for the lat2, and a neutral handle is usually the kinder option on a sore shoulder. They are separate movements in Reckoner with separate records, so pick one and stay with it for the block.
Which pull-down should I log this as?
The one you actually did. Each grip is its own entry in the library with its own history, so a close-grip set logged against the wide-grip bar makes the record of both of them worse.
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
- Andersen, Fimland, Wiik, Skoglund and Saeterbakken, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2014. Effects of grip width on muscle strength and activation in the lat pull-down fifteen men tested at their six repetition maximum with narrow, medium and wide pronated grips at one, one and a half and two times the biacromial distance, finding similar latissimus dorsi, trapezius and infraspinatus activation across the three widths and a heavier six repetition maximum on the narrow and medium grips than on the wide one
- Lusk, Hale and Russell, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2010. Grip width and forearm orientation effects on muscle activity during the lat pull-down twelve men measured through four front pull-down grips, where a pronated grip produced greater latissimus dorsi activity than a supinated one and grip width had no effect on the latissimus dorsi, the middle trapezius or the biceps