reckonerHalf-kneeling dumbbell press
One bell, one knee down, one arm pressing. Take away a leg and take away the second weight, and the trunk suddenly has a job it could avoid on a bench. That is the point of the position. The load on the shoulder is the smaller half of what makes it hard.
Ribs stacked over hips, glute tight.
- Pattern
- Vertical push
- Trains
- Front delts, triceps, abs
- Kit
- Dumbbell, floor
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 8 to 12 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
- Shoulder, elbow, knee
Muscles worked
How to do it
Get into a clean half-kneeling stance
One knee down, the other foot flat in front, both legs at about a right angle, shins roughly parallel. A pad under the down knee if the floor is hard. Feet on two lines rather than one, so you have a base to stand on rather than a tightrope.
Take the bell on the same side as the down knee
That puts the weight over the leg that is not helping you, so the trunk has to do the holding rather than the hip. Pressing on the other side is a different and easier exercise, so pick one and keep it.
Stack the ribs over the hips and squeeze the down glute
This is the cue Reckoner puts on your wrist and it is the whole setup. Glute tight, ribs down, and you are one rigid column from knee to shoulder before the bell moves at all.
Press straight up and come back to the shoulder
The bell finishes over the shoulder, not out to the side and not across your face. Lower it under control to about ear height without letting the ribs flare on the way down.
What goes wrong
Letting the ribs flare and the back arch
It is the same failure as leaning back under a barbell, only harder to see because you are already low. The ribs come up, the lower back takes the arch and the press becomes a lean. If the ribs will not stay down, the bell is too heavy.
Leaning away from the weight
The whole body tips toward the empty side to counterbalance and the bell travels up in a line that has nothing to do with your shoulder. That lean is the trunk work you came for, being avoided.
Loading it like a two-arm press
One arm at a time is not half of a two-arm set. Pressing one bell rather than two produced around sixty eight per cent more external oblique activity standing1, and everything that trunk is doing is capacity you are not spending on the press.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 12 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 12 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 12 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 12 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 12 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 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 12 at 12 kg | Load up 12 kg → 14 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2 kg to 14 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
Why kneel at all?
To take away the places the load can hide. Two things are measured here: pressing standing rather than seated raised rectus abdominis activity a long way, and pressing one arm rather than two raised oblique activity a long way1. This movement does both at once. What nobody has measured is half kneeling against standing specifically, so read the kneeling itself as the reason the position exists rather than as a number somebody produced.
Does it press less weight than a seated press?
Yes, and by design. In upper body pushing generally, the less stable the position the less the prime movers are able to do and the more the trunk takes on2. You are buying trunk work with shoulder load. If what you want is the most weight on the shoulder, the seated press is the movement in the library for that.
What does Reckoner do when this lift stalls?
It eases the load and lets you rebuild toward the weight you were stuck at, and only offers you a different seated press if the same wall comes back. It records the load per hand, so nothing here is halved or doubled behind your back.
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
- Saeterbakken and Fimland, European Journal of Applied Physiology, 2012. Muscle activity of the core during bilateral, unilateral, seated and standing resistance exercise external oblique activity being about sixty eight per cent lower in the standing bilateral dumbbell shoulder press than in the unilateral version, and rectus abdominis activity being about eighty one per cent lower seated than standing
- Calatayud and colleagues, The Physician and Sportsmedicine, 2014. Muscle activity levels in upper-body push exercises with different loads and stability conditions pectoralis major, anterior deltoid and serratus anterior being most elicited in the more stable pushing conditions, with abdominal, triceps, posterior deltoid and upper trapezius activity moving the opposite way