reckonerMachine chest press
The press that holds the bar path for you. Nothing here is spent balancing, which makes it the press you can take closest to the end of a set with nobody standing over you. The library also rates it the easiest chest press to learn, and skill is one of the few things Reckoner will not let a plan overrule.
Press without locking the elbows out.
- Pattern
- Horizontal push
- Trains
- Chest, triceps, front delts
- Kit
- Machine chest press
- 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 seat by the handles, not by your legs
Sit down and check where the handles sit. They belong level with the middle of your chest, roughly at nipple height. If they are up by your collarbone you are about to do a shoulder press with your chest's weight on the stack.
Get your back onto the pad
Shoulders back against the pad, chest up, feet flat on the floor. The pad is doing what a bench does, and the same rule applies: whatever position you press from is the position you have to still be in when the set ends.
Press out to almost straight
Push the handles away until your arms are nearly locked, without letting your shoulders round forward off the pad to add an inch. The last inch that comes from your back leaving the pad is not the chest's inch.
Come back until you feel the chest stretch
Let the handles come back under control until your hands are around chest level and you feel the chest lengthen. Most machines stop you before that anyway. Stopping short of where the machine stops you is choosing to do less.
What goes wrong
Leaving the seat where the last person had it
One notch too low turns this into an incline press, one too high turns it into a decline. It takes five seconds to check and it changes what the movement trains.
Only doing the top half
The stack gets easy to move near lockout, so the set drifts into short reps at the end. Full range training beats partial range for strength1, and short reps also break the comparison with last week.
Peeling off the pad to move the weight
The shoulders round forward and the trunk twists to get the handles out. That is the weight telling you it has won. Take a pin off and keep your back where you put it.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 40 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 40 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 40 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 40 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 40 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 40 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 40 kg | Load up 40 kg → 45 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 5 kg to 45 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
Is a machine worse than free weights?
Not for building muscle. A meta-analysis of thirteen studies found no difference between free weight and machine training for hypertrophy, and found that strength gains were specific to what you tested: free weight training won free weight tests, machine training tended to win machine tests2.
Should I use this or the barbell bench press?
Use whichever one you can set up correctly and take close to failure on your own. If you train alone with no rack and no spotter, this is the press that lets you finish a hard set without a decision about whether you can get the bar back up.
Why does this climb in bigger jumps than the dumbbells?
Because a weight stack is stacked in the size of plate it was built with, and that plate is bigger than the gap between two dumbbells. Reckoner asks each movement what its own gym holds instead of adding a percentage that lands between two pins.
Similar movements
Reckoner has no other movement in this swap group.
Sources
- Pallarés and colleagues, Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports, 2021. Effects of range of motion on resistance training adaptations: A systematic review and meta-analysis full range of motion training producing significantly greater strength adaptations than partial range training across sixteen studies
- Haugen and colleagues, BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation, 2023. Effect of free-weight vs. machine-based strength training on maximal strength, hypertrophy and jump performance: a systematic review and meta-analysis thirteen studies and 1016 participants, no difference between free weight and machine training for hypertrophy, and strength changes being specific to the training modality