reckonerGood morning
A hinge with the bar on your upper back instead of in your hands. The weight sits a long way from your hips, so the leverage against you is much worse than a Romanian deadlift and the numbers are much smaller. That is the exercise working, not you being weak at it.
Soft knees, hinge with a flat back.
- Pattern
- Hinge
- Trains
- Hamstrings, glutes, spinal erectors
- Kit
- Barbell
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 8 to 12 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2.5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Bar
- 20 kg
- Skill
- Technical
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Lower back, hip
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the bar as you would for a squat
Across the shelf of muscle on your upper back, not on your neck. Hands out wide enough to keep the upper back tight. Take it out of the rack and step back.
Feet about hip width, soft knees
A small bend in the knees that stays there. This is a hinge, so the knee angle should barely change from the start of the rep to the bottom of it.
Soft knees, hinge with a flat back
That is the cue on your wrist, and both halves matter. Push the hips back and let the chest come down. The back stays flat from your head to your tailbone for the whole rep.
Stop at the hamstrings and stand up
Come down until the hamstrings run out of length, which for most people is well above level, then drive the hips forward. Do not chase a horizontal torso.
What goes wrong
Loading it like a Romanian deadlift
The bar is much further from your hips here, so the same weight is a great deal harder and your lower back is what carries the difference. Start far lighter than you think and let it climb slowly. There is no prize for the number on this one.
Rounding the back at the bottom
With the bar on your back a rounded spine is being loaded through its whole length, which is the single situation this movement can genuinely go wrong in. If the back rounds, the rep is over. Shorten the range and lighten the bar.
Expecting it to feel like a leg curl
It will not, and both belong in a plan. Hip extension patterns like this preferentially recruit the long head of biceps femoris, whereas knee bending patterns recruit the semitendinosus instead1. A good morning is not a substitute for a curl, and a curl is not a substitute for this.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 40 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 8 at 40 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. |
| 2 | 3 x 9 at 40 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. |
| 3 | 3 x 10 at 40 kg | More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 11 at 40 kg | More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 12 at 40 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 12 at 40 kg | Load up 40 kg → 42.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 42.5 kg and reps reset to eight. 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
Is the good morning dangerous?
It is the least forgiving hinge in the library, because the load sits furthest from the hips and it is on your back rather than in your hands. Done with a flat back at a sensible load it is a normal exercise. Done heavy with a rounding back it is the worst position in here. That is why the library records lower back and hip against it and why Reckoner will not prescribe it if you declare either.
Good morning or Romanian deadlift?
The Romanian deadlift for most people most of the time: same pattern, much better leverage, far more load on the hamstrings for the same risk. The good morning earns its place when you want the hinge without holding anything, or as a lighter accessory.
Why can I lift so much less than on a Romanian deadlift?
Leverage, not weakness. The bar on your back is roughly the length of your torso away from the hip joint doing the work. Reckoner keeps the two lifts as separate records for exactly this reason, so neither number is measured against the other.
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
- Bourne and colleagues, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2017. Impact of exercise selection on hamstring muscle activation twenty-four men measured across ten hamstring exercises by surface electrodes and then by MRI, hip extension patterns preferentially recruiting the long head of biceps femoris and the Nordic curl preferentially recruiting the semitendinosus instead