reckonerDumbbell reverse lunge
Step back, drop the back knee, stand up on the front leg. One leg at a time, which means the dumbbells in your hands are carried by half the body they would be on a squat, and it means a side that is doing less has nowhere left to hide.
Step back, drop the back knee down.
- Pattern
- Lunge
- Trains
- Glutes, quads
- Kit
- Dumbbell
- 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
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Knee, hip
Muscles worked
How to do it
Stand tall with a dumbbell in each hand
Arms hanging, shoulders back, feet under your hips. Look straight ahead at something that is not moving, because your balance will follow your eyes.
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.
Drop the back knee toward the floor
Let the back knee come down until it is just off the ground. That is the cue on your wrist. The front shin stays close to vertical and the front heel stays down.
Push through the front heel and stand
Drive up through the front leg and bring the back foot home. The back leg is there for balance, not to push off with.
Decide how you are counting and stay with it
All the reps on one leg then the other, or alternating. Both are fine and they are not the same set, so pick one and keep it for the whole block.
What goes wrong
Pushing off the back foot
If the back leg drives you up, the front leg is not being trained and the load you logged went somewhere you cannot see. The back toe is a kickstand. Stand up on the front heel.
Stepping back too short
A short step puts the front knee a long way over the toes and turns the movement into a quad exercise you cannot get depth on. If your front shin is falling forward, the step behind you needs to be longer.
Adding weight before the shape holds
This is a balance exercise before it is a strength one. If the last rep of a set wanders and the first one did not, the dumbbells are heavier than your control, and the record you are building will be of a movement that changed halfway through.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 16 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 16 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 16 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 16 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 16 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 16 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 16 kg | Load up 16 kg → 18 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2 kg to 18 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
Reverse lunge or forward lunge?
Reverse, if the choice is free. In a comparison of forward, reverse and walking lunges the reverse version produced high activity in the working muscles at the lowest momentary peak knee shearing force of the three, and its authors named that as the reason to prefer it1. Read it lightly: it was four lifters at a conference, so it points a direction rather than settling the question.
Do I have to hold dumbbells?
No. There is a bodyweight reverse lunge and a weighted vest version in the library, and each is its own movement with its own record. What matters is that you log the one you actually did, because a set logged as loaded and done empty is a lie the engine will believe.
Will Reckoner give me this with a knee restriction?
No. Declare a knee restriction in setup and this movement comes out of your plan, and the same is true of a hip restriction.
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
- Park and colleagues, International Conference on Biomechanics in Sports, 2016. Comparative Analysis of Lunge Techniques: Forward, Reverse, Walking Lunge four lifters measured through three lunge patterns, the reverse lunge producing higher agonist muscle activity at a relatively low momentary peak knee shearing force. Flagged as a small conference study rather than a journal trial, and older than five years