reckonerDumbbell split squat
Feet split front and back, then squat straight down between them. Your feet stay where they are for the whole set, which is what separates it from a lunge: no stepping, no landing, no balance recovery. One leg does most of the work and you get to concentrate on it.
Drop straight down, front heel planted.
- Pattern
- Lunge
- Trains
- Quads, glutes
- 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
Set the stance before you pick anything up
Step one foot forward into a stride long enough that both knees can reach a right angle. Front foot flat, back heel up. Get this right empty handed, because it is hard to adjust with weights in your hands.
Take a dumbbell in each hand
Arms hanging at your sides. The weights do not need to do anything except be heavy, so let them hang and keep your shoulders back.
Drop straight down, front heel planted
That is the cue on your wrist. Straight down, not forward. The back knee travels toward the floor and the front heel does not move at all.
Push back up through the front heel
Stand up on the front leg. Stop just short of locking the front knee and go straight into the next rep. Finish all the reps on one side before you swap.
What goes wrong
Drifting forward instead of down
If your front knee travels a long way over your toes on every rep, you are lunging in place rather than split squatting. The whole point of a fixed stance is that the movement is vertical. Lengthen the stance and think about the back knee going down.
Rushing the second leg
The second side is always harder because you are already tired, and the temptation is to shorten it. Then your record says both legs did the same work when they did not, and the difference between your sides quietly grows under a number that says it is not.
Thinking of it as a small exercise
It loads one leg with your whole bodyweight plus the dumbbells, and it is not gentle. The split squat cleared the very high threshold in a review of gluteus maximus activation, alongside the hip thrust and the conventional deadlift1. Program it like a main lift, not like an accessory.
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
Split squat or rear foot elevated split squat?
Start here. Putting the back foot on a bench adds range and a real balance demand, and it moves the work further toward the hip: measured against a back squat, the elevated version asked significantly less of the knee, to the point that its knee demand fell below its ankle demand2. Both are in the library separately.
How long should my stance be?
Long enough that at the bottom of the rep both knees are at about a right angle and your front shin is close to vertical. Shorter than that and the front knee takes over. Longer and you will feel it as a stretch at the front of the back hip instead.
Will Reckoner give me this with a hip restriction?
No. Knee and hip are both recorded against it. Declare either in setup and it comes out of your plan.
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
- 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
- Mackey and Riemann, International Journal of Exercise Science, 2021. Biomechanical Differences Between the Bulgarian Split-Squat and Back Squat twenty resistance-trained men measured through both lifts, both being hip dominant, and the rear-foot-elevated split squat placing significantly less demand and about nine degrees less flexion on the knee than the back squat, to the point that its knee demand fell below its ankle demand