reckonerLat pull-down
The pull-down is the vertical pull almost anybody can start on. It trains the lats, the upper back and the biceps, it takes a load you choose rather than a load you happen to weigh, and the stack means the next step up is always available.
Lead with the elbows, bar to the chest.
- Pattern
- Vertical pull
- Trains
- Lats, upper back, biceps
- Kit
- Machine lat pulldown
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 6 to 10 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Low
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the pad and the pin
Bring the thigh pad down until your legs are pinned firmly enough that you cannot lift off the seat. Pick a weight you can stop at the top of, not one you have to be dragged up by.
Take the bar in the hang
Hands a little wider than your shoulders, palms away, wrists straight rather than curled over the bar. Sit tall, then lean back no more than about ten degrees and stay there.
Lead with the elbows
Pull your elbows down toward your ribs and let the bar follow to your upper chest. Thinking about the back is not only a cue: when eight beginners were coached to pull with it, their lat activity rose, though their biceps did not work any less1.
Let it back up under control
Reverse it slowly until your arms are straight and you feel the shoulder blades rise. That last stretch is most of the point, so do not stop the rep short of it.
What goes wrong
Leaning back to finish the rep
Once your torso is swinging, it is a row with a bad angle and the load stops being the load. If you have to lean, take the pin up one.
Pulling behind the neck
It puts the shoulder at end range under load for no extra benefit: measured in trained men, lat activity was the same behind the neck as to the front, and the authors advised against the behind-the-neck version2. To the chest, every time.
Half a rep at the top
Stopping short of a straight arm keeps constant tension on the biceps and takes the stretch away from the lats, which is the half of the rep that actually built anything.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 45 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 45 kg | First week Where the run starts. Nothing is logged yet, so nothing has changed. |
| 2 | 4 x 7 at 45 kg | More reps 6 → 7 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 4 x 8 at 45 kg | More reps 7 → 8 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 4 x 9 at 45 kg | More reps 8 → 9 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 4 x 10 at 45 kg | More reps 9 → 10 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 6 | 2 x 10 at 45 kg | Deload 4 → 2 setsFive 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. |
| Next | 4 x 6 at 50 kg | Load up 45 kg → 50 kgYou earned this before the lighter week. The lighter week was for recovery, not a test, so the rise waited for it to end. Now the weight on the machine goes up to 50 kg. 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
Is a pull-down as good as a pull-up?
For building the lats, close enough that the difference is not worth arguing about. The pull-up is harder to load lightly and easier to load heavily, so Reckoner picks between them from what your gym has and where your strength is.
My gym's stack goes up in bigger steps than Reckoner asks for. Why?
Reckoner steps this machine on its stack ladder, in kilograms and pounds alike. If your gym's pins are coarser than that, you can describe your machine pin in your gym settings and Reckoner will use your own steps. Until then, round to the nearest pin and log what you actually pulled.
Wide grip or neutral grip?
Either. If a wide grip bothers your shoulder or your elbow, the neutral grip pull-down is in the same swap group and Reckoner will offer it.
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
- Snyder and Leech, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2009. Voluntary increase in latissimus dorsi muscle activity during the lat pull-down following expert instruction eight untrained women on the wide-grip lat pull-down, latissimus dorsi activity rising significantly after technique instruction while biceps brachii activity did not change. PMID 19826307, DOI 10.1519/JSC.0b013e3181bb7213
- Sperandei and colleagues, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2009. Electromyographic analysis of three different types of lat pull-down twenty-four trained men at 80 per cent of their best single, no difference in latissimus dorsi activity between behind-the-neck, front-of-the-neck and V-bar pull-downs, and the authors advising against the behind-the-neck version. PMID 19855327, DOI 10.1519/JSC.0b013e3181b8d30a