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
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 towards your ribs and let the bar follow to your upper chest. Think about the elbows and the lats do the work. Think about the hands and the biceps take it.
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 anybody has been able to show. 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 | More reps 6 → 7 repsRPE 7.5 with room left in the range, so reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 4 x 7 at 45 kg | More reps 7 → 8 repsRPE 7.5 with room left in the range, so reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 4 x 8 at 45 kg | Deload 40% of sets offThree 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. |
| 4 | 2 x 8 at 45 kg | More reps 8 → 9 repsRPE 7.5 with room left in the range, so reps climb before the load does. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four sets. |
| 5 | 4 x 9 at 45 kg | More reps 9 → 10 repsRPE 7.5 with room left in the range, so reps climb before the load does. |
| 6 | 4 x 10 at 45 kg | Load up 45 kg → 50 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7.5, so the bar goes up 5 kg to 50 kg and reps reset to six. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running reckoner/engine.py 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?
The step in the fact block above is the ladder every metric plan has used since the start, and a commercial pin stack is usually coarser than that. The real inventory of each machine is recorded and is not applied to kilogram athletes yet, deliberately: moving it changes what an athlete is prescribed, so it happens once, with their consent. 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 will offer any of these when this lift stalls. None of them is written up yet.