reckonerHalf-kneeling cable pull-down
One arm at a time from a half-kneeling stance under a high pulley. You get a full overhead pull without a pull-down station, and the stance makes it obvious when you are leaning away from the weight rather than pulling it.
Pull the elbow down, ribs stay stacked.
- Pattern
- Vertical pull
- Trains
- Lats, upper back
- Kit
- Cable
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 8 to 12 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Knee
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the pulley high and kneel square to it
Inside knee down, outside foot forward, both hips facing the machine. Kneel on a pad. The floor of a gym is not kind to a kneecap for three sets.
Reach up and let the shoulder go with it
Take the handle in the hand on the kneeling side and let that shoulder rise all the way. The overhead reach is the part a two-handed bar makes harder to get.
Pull the elbow down to your ribs
Drive the elbow down and slightly back, finishing beside your ribs with the forearm vertical. Keep the ribs stacked over the hips throughout, which is the cue on your wrist.
Let it back up under control
Reverse until the arm is straight and the shoulder has lifted again, then start the next one. Finish every rep on one side before you change hands.
What goes wrong
Leaning away from the cable to move the weight
The torso tips sideways, the load travels, and the lat did very little of it. Half-kneeling exists to make that visible. If you cannot stay stacked, take the pin up.
Turning the torso into the pull
Rotating towards the working side shortens the distance the handle has to travel and quietly removes the top of the range. Hips and shoulders stay square to the machine.
Doing one side heavier because it can
Run both sides at what the weaker one can do honestly. Strength gains follow the way you train, so training one arm at a time is a good way to sort out a side-to-side gap and a poor way to widen one1.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 25 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 25 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 25 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 25 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 25 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 25 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 25 kg | Load up 25 kg → 30 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 5 kg to 30 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 one arm at a time better than a normal pull-down?
Not for size. Pooling nine studies, training one limb at a time and training both produced no significant difference in muscle growth, while strength gains followed the way each group trained1. Use it because a station is busy, because you want the extra reach, or because one side is behind.
Why kneel at all? Can I stand?
You can, and then you can also push with your legs, lean and rotate. The half-kneeling stance takes those away. That is the whole benefit and it is also why it feels harder at the same weight.
Reckoner will not give me this. Why?
Knee is the restriction recorded against it, because one kneecap is on the floor for the whole set. Declare a knee problem in setup and the movement leaves your plan, and other overhead pulls stay in.
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
- Kassiano and colleagues, Sports Medicine, 2025. Comparison of muscle growth and dynamic strength adaptations induced by unilateral and bilateral resistance training: a systematic review and meta-analysis nine studies pooled, finding no significant difference in muscle growth between training one limb at a time and training both, and strength gains that follow specificity, bilateral training favoring bilateral tests and unilateral training favoring unilateral ones