reckonerHollow hold
Flat on your back, arms overhead, legs straight and low, and the whole of your lower back pressed into the floor. It is the hardest of the bracing holds in this library for most people, and the position collapses the instant you stop paying attention to it.
Low back flat, ribs down, legs low.
- Pattern
- Core anti-extension
- Trains
- Abs, hip flexors
- Kit
- Bodyweight, floor
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 holds of 30 to 60 seconds
- Progression step
- 10 seconds on the hold
- Skill
- Technical
- Recovery cost
- Low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Lower back, neck
Muscles worked
How to do it
Start with the back flat and the knees up
Lie down, knees bent over the hips, and press the small of your back down until there is no gap. That contact is the whole hold. Everything else is decoration on top of it.
Lift the shoulders and reach the arms back
Curl the head and shoulders off the floor, ribs pulled down toward the hips, and take the arms overhead. Keep the neck long rather than tucking the chin hard into the chest.
Straighten the legs as low as you can hold
Extend the legs away and lower them only to the point where the back is still flat. That point is your version of the hold today. For most people it is much higher than they expect.
Breathe, and stop at the first gap
Keep breathing shallowly through it. The set ends when your back lifts off the floor, not when the timer says so, and the honest number is the time before that happened.
What goes wrong
Legs too low, back arched
Low legs look like the picture, so people go there first. Once the back arches the abs have stopped holding anything and the hip flexors and the lower back are carrying the position.
Yanking on the neck
The chin drives into the chest to get the shoulders higher. The neck is not what should be tired at the end of this. Reach long through the arms and let the ribs do the curling.
Holding the breath
It braces the trunk for you, so the hold gets longer and teaches less. The useful skill is staying tight while air moves, because that is what a heavy lift asks for.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, 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 30 s | Longer hold 30 → 40 sYou held every set at RPE 7, so the hold gains ten seconds. A hold with nothing in the hands climbs on time, because time is the only axis it has. |
| 2 | 3 x 40 s | Longer hold 40 → 50 sYou held every set at RPE 7, so the hold gains ten seconds. A hold with nothing in the hands climbs on time, because time is the only axis it has. |
| 3 | 3 x 50 s | Longer hold 50 → 60 sYou held every set at RPE 7, so the hold gains ten seconds. A hold with nothing in the hands climbs on time, because time is the only axis it has. |
| 4 | 3 x 60 s | Holding steady 60 sYou held every set at RPE 7, and 60 seconds is the top of what this hold was prescribed for. There is nothing to put in your hands to make it harder, so this one has run out of room. It stays where it is. If you want to keep pushing here, swap it for a harder movement when the block ends. |
| 5 | 3 x 60 s | 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 60 s | Holding steady 60 sYou held every set at RPE 7, and 60 seconds is the top of what this hold was prescribed for. There is nothing to put in your hands to make it harder, so this one has run out of room. It stays where it is. If you want to keep pushing here, swap it for a harder movement when the block ends. 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 do I make it easier?
Shorten the lever. Bend the knees, or keep the arms by your sides instead of overhead, or raise the legs higher. Any of the three lets you hold a genuinely flat back, which is the only version of this that is worth timing.
Hollow hold or plank?
They are in the same family and Reckoner treats them as alternatives, so alternating keeps your history in one line. The plank holds you up on four points of contact and the hollow hold on none, which is why most people can keep a decent plank long before they can keep a decent hollow. Start with the plank if the back will not stay down.
Will holding this longer and longer keep helping?
There is a point where adding seconds stops being the useful lever, and a harder version is the better answer: legs straighter, arms further overhead, or a hold with a longer lever than this one. Reckoner adds seconds while the hold keeps moving, and offers you something else in the same family when it stops.
Similar movements
There is no load to ease on this lift, so Reckoner offers one of these the first time it stalls. Each of them has a page.