reckonerMachine hip thrust
The hip thrust with the setup taken away. You sit down, set the pad, pick a pin and go, and no part of that involves rolling a loaded bar over your legs. That is most of why the machine exists and it is a better reason than it sounds.
Squeeze the glutes, ribs stay down.
- Pattern
- Hinge
- Trains
- Glutes
- Kit
- Machine hip thrust
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 5 to 8 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Hip
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the back pad first
The pad your shoulders rest against should meet you at about the bottom of the shoulder blades, the same place a bench edge would. Set that before you set anything else, because everything after it is measured from where your shoulders sit.
Bring the hip pad across the hips
The pad belongs across the crease of your hips, low on the pelvis. High on the stomach is the single most common setup fault on these machines and it makes the top of the rep both painful and short.
Set the feet on the platform
Feet about shoulder width and placed so your shins are vertical at the top of the rep. The platform gives you a lot of room to get this wrong in both directions, so check it against the top position rather than the bottom.
Ribs down and drive
Squeeze the glutes and keep the ribs down, which is the cue on your wrist. Push until your hips are through, hold, and come back down without letting the stack touch.
What goes wrong
Letting the seat back do the lockout
There is something solid behind your shoulders, which makes it very easy to finish the rep by arching over it instead of extending your hips. The back rest is there to hold your shoulders still, not to be pushed against.
Reading the number on the stack as a real weight
Stacks are labelled differently between manufacturers and some run through a pulley before they reach you, so the pin you use on one machine tells you nothing about another one. Use the same machine week to week and the record means something. Move gyms and it does not.
Choosing the machine because it must be the safer one
There is no published comparison of a hip thrust machine against a barbell hip thrust, so nothing on this page can tell you that one is safer or builds more than the other. What a review of twelve training studies did find is that single-joint and multi-joint work both grew the gluteus maximus, alone and in combination1. Choose the one you will set up and actually do.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 60 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 5 at 60 kg | More reps 5 → 6 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 4 x 6 at 60 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. |
| 3 | 4 x 7 at 60 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. |
| 4 | 4 x 8 at 60 kg | Load up 60 kg → 65 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 5 kg to 65 kg and reps reset to five. |
| 5 | 4 x 5 at 65 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 5 at 65 kg | More reps 5 → 6 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 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
Machine or barbell?
Nobody has run that comparison, so the honest answer is whichever one you will load. The machine's real advantage is that there is no bar to roll over your legs and no pad to hunt for, which for a lot of people is the difference between doing the movement and skipping it.
The jumps between pins feel too big. What do I do?
Tell Reckoner about the machine. The gym card in setup takes the size of the smallest jump your pin stack makes, and once it knows, every load it gives you on this movement is a pin you can actually select rather than a number between two of them.
Can a block be built around this lift?
Yes. It is one of the movements Reckoner will anchor a block on. It also comes out of your plan if you declare a hip restriction in setup.
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
- Krause Neto and colleagues, Frontiers in Physiology, 2025. The impact of resistance training on gluteus maximus hypertrophy: a systematic review and meta-analysis twelve studies and 318 participants, a moderate pooled effect on gluteus maximus size, with single-joint and multi-joint exercises effective alone and in combination