reckonerLandmine press
One end of a barbell pinned in a corner or a sleeve, the other end in one hand, pressed up and in on an angle. It sits between a bench press and an overhead press and belongs to neither, which is exactly why people reach for it when pressing straight overhead is off the table.
Press up and in, ribs down.
- Pattern
- Vertical push
- Trains
- Front delts, chest, triceps
- Kit
- Landmine, barbell
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 6 to 10 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2.5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
Muscles worked
How to do it
Pin the far end so it cannot travel
A landmine sleeve if the gym has one, a corner with a plate or a folded towel against the end if it does not. Test it under load before you trust it. A bar end that skids across a floor mid rep is the one real hazard in this movement.
Take the end at the shoulder
Cup the end of the sleeve in one hand, thumb side up, elbow tucked in front of the ribs rather than out to the side. Stand square or in a short split stance, whichever lets you keep the ribs down.
Press up and in
The bar wants to travel on an arc toward the middle of your body because the far end is fixed. Follow it. The hand finishes high and in front of your face rather than out over your shoulder. That is the cue Reckoner puts on your wrist.
Return to the shoulder under control
Bring it back down the same arc and stop at the shoulder. The far end being anchored means the bar will find its own path down if you let it, and letting it is how the elbow ends up somewhere your shoulder did not agree to.
What goes wrong
Turning the torso to help the arm
The shoulders rotate toward the bar and the press becomes a throw. Square the ribs to the front and keep them there. If you cannot press it without turning, the plate on the far end is the thing to change.
Pressing it straight out like a bench press
The angle is the whole reason this movement is in the library. Push it horizontally and you have a poor one-arm chest press with a bar in the way. Up and in, so the hand travels toward the line of your body.
Expecting two-arm numbers per hand
One arm at a time is not half of a two-arm set: pressing one side alone raised external oblique activity around sixty eight per cent in the same lifters1, and all of that trunk work is capacity not going into the press.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 20 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 | 4 x 6 at 20 kg | More reps 6 → 7 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 4 x 7 at 20 kg | More reps 7 → 8 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 4 x 8 at 20 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. |
| 4 | 4 x 9 at 20 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. |
| 5 | 4 x 10 at 20 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 10 at 20 kg | Load up 20 kg → 22.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 22.5 kg and reps reset to six. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four 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
What does the research say about the landmine press?
Almost nothing, and the page will not pretend otherwise. A search of the medical literature turns up one study of the movement itself, and it is about tracking the bar with a camera rather than about what the lift does to a shoulder2. There is no published comparison of the landmine press against an overhead press or a bench press for muscle activity, strength or size. Everything else you read about it, this page included, is reasoning from the angle.
Why press it at all, then?
Because of where the arm ends up. It is a press that finishes in front of your face rather than over your head, so it is available on a day or in a body where straight overhead is not. That is a reason to have it, and it is a smaller reason than the internet usually makes it.
What does Reckoner do when this lift stalls?
It eases the load and lets you rebuild toward the weight you were stuck at. There is nothing to rotate you to: the landmine press is alone in its swap group, so the reset is the whole answer here. It records the load per hand.
Similar movements
Reckoner has no other movement in this swap group.
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
- Zhao and colleagues, Sensors, 2026. Landmine Press Kinematics Measured with an Enhanced YOLOv8 Model and Mathematical Modeling being a study of how to measure the landmine press's bar kinematics rather than a study of its training effect, and the only published measurement of the movement