reckonerInverted curl
Lie under a bar with an underhand grip, keep your elbows at your sides, and curl your chest up to your hands. It is a curl with your own bodyweight as the load, and the bar height is the dial.
Elbows stay at your sides, chest to hands.
- Pattern
- Arm isolation
- Trains
- Biceps
- Kit
- Bodyweight, sturdy surface
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 10 to 15 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- Nothing to add, so the sets climb instead
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Very low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Elbow, wrist
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the bar around waist height
A smith machine bar or a rack pin works. Higher makes it easier and lower makes it harder, so start higher than you think and lower it once the reps are clean.
Take an underhand grip and build the plank
Palms towards you, hands about shoulder width, heels on the floor, glutes squeezed, one straight line from ankle to ear.
Bend only at the elbows
Keep the upper arms locked at your sides and curl your body up until your chest comes to your hands. Elbows stay at your sides, chest to hands, which is the cue on your wrist. The shoulders do not move.
Lower until the arms are straight
Come down under control, elbows fully open, hips still in line. If the hips drop before the arms straighten, the plank went before the curl did.
What goes wrong
Letting the elbows travel
The upper arms drift back and forward and it turns into an awkward row. The elbows are the hinge and nothing else about you should be moving.
Piking at the hips
Folding at the waist brings the chest to the hands with the arms barely bending. Squeeze the glutes and check your own hip line rather than trusting the feel.
Starting with the bar too low
Near horizontal, this is far harder than it looks, and the first thing to go is the elbow position. Set the bar high, earn the reps, then drop it.
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 10 | 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. |
| 2 | 3 x 11 | 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. |
| 3 | 3 x 12 | More reps 12 → 13 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 13 | More reps 13 → 14 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 14 | 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 14 | More reps 14 → 15 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with 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
Is a bodyweight curl worth doing?
When there is nothing to lift, yes. It loads the elbow flexors through a full range with tension you can adjust by moving the bar, which is more than most bodyweight arm ideas manage.
How do I progress it?
Lower the bar, then elevate your feet, then slow the lowering half down. Reckoner climbs the rep range and then adds a set, because a bodyweight movement has no load to add.
Why will Reckoner not give me this with an elbow or wrist problem?
Elbow and wrist are the restrictions recorded against it. The grip is fixed underhand and the wrist is loaded at an angle you cannot adjust mid rep, which is exactly the thing an irritable wrist does badly with.
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.