reckonerDumbbell upright row
A pull straight up the front of your body, elbows leading, until your hands reach chest height. It trains the side delts and upper traps together. With dumbbells your hands can travel a little wider than on a bar, and in one study a wider grip drew more delt and trap activity1.
Lead with the elbows, stop at chest height.
- Pattern
- Shoulder isolation
- Trains
- Side delts, traps
- Kit
- Dumbbell
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 12 to 15 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Shoulder
Muscles worked
How to do it
Stand tall with the bells in front
Hold a dumbbell in each hand in front of your thighs, palms facing you, feet about hip width. Standing tall keeps the pull vertical, which is the movement.
Lead with the elbows
Pull the bells up close to your body by lifting your elbows out and up. The elbows stay higher than the hands the whole way, because that is what makes the shoulders and traps do it rather than the biceps.
Stop at chest height
Stop when your hands reach about the bottom of your chest and your elbows are around shoulder height. Pulling higher than that only raises the elbows further above the shoulders.
Lower slowly
Take the bells back down to your thighs under control before the next rep.
What goes wrong
Pulling to the chin
Higher feels like a fuller rep. Chasing the bells to your chin pushes the elbows well above the shoulders. Chest height is the top of the rep.
Hands leading the elbows
Lifting with the hands feels natural because that is how you pick things up. It turns into a curl. Think about lifting the elbows and let the hands follow.
Swinging the hips
A hip drive gets heavier bells up, so it feels strong. Stand still and take weight off if you need it.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 10 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 | 3 x 12 at 10 kg | More reps 12 → 13 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 3 x 13 at 10 kg | More reps 13 → 14 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 3 x 14 at 10 kg | More reps 14 → 15 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 15 at 10 kg | Load up 10 kg → 12 kgYou hit the top of the range with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7), so the dumbbell weight goes up 2 kg to 12 kg. The weight went up, so the reps come down to eight. You are now working 8 to 11. |
| 5 | 3 x 8 at 12 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 8 at 12 kg | More reps 8 → 9 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. The lighter week is over, so this is back to three 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
How wide should my hands be?
A little wider than you would hold a bar. Delt and trap activity rose as the grip widened from narrow to wide in one study of the barbell upright row1.
Upright row or lateral raise?
Both train the side delts. The upright row brings in the upper traps too. The lateral raise trains the side delt without the shoulder position this one asks for. Reckoner places the lateral raise and keeps this as a choice.
Will Reckoner put this in my plan?
Not by itself. The dumbbell lateral raise does the side delt work without that shoulder position, so the engine never chooses this for you. Choose it in the lift picker or as a swap. Shoulder is recorded against it.
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
- McAllister and colleagues, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2013. Effect of grip width on electromyographic activity during the upright row sixteen weight trained men performing barbell upright rows at 50, 100 and 200 per cent of shoulder width, with deltoid and trapezius activity rising and biceps activity falling as grip width increased. Over five years old, and still the study that measured it