reckonerMachine row
Chest on a pad, handles in front of you, pull them back. Nothing about a machine row is clever, and that is the argument for it: there is almost nothing to get wrong, so the set ends when your back is done rather than when your technique is.
Chest on the pad, pull the elbows back.
- Pattern
- Horizontal pull
- Trains
- Upper back, lats
- Kit
- Machine row
- 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 height first
Raise or lower it until the handles sit at about the height of your lower chest with your arms out straight. Too high and the elbows flare, too low and you end up pulling into your lap.
Get the chest onto the pad
Slide forward until your sternum is against the pad and your feet are planted. Chest on the pad, which is the cue on your wrist, and it stays there for every rep.
Reach forward, then pull the elbows back
Let the arms straighten and the shoulder blades slide forward first. Then drive the elbows back past your ribs and squeeze the blades together at the end.
Let it back out slowly
Return under control to a straight arm with the blades open again. A machine will happily let you pull short reps all day, and the counting will look fine.
What goes wrong
Shrugging the weight back
The shoulders climb towards the ears at the finish and the upper traps take a pull the mid back was supposed to have. Keep the collarbones wide and the shoulders down, then pull.
Pushing off the footplate
A hard leg drive rocks your chest off the pad and adds a few centimetres to the handle path. It also makes every rep slightly different from the last one.
Never touching the reach at the front
Holding the handles close with the blades locked back keeps the arms under tension and skips the lengthened end. Let the shoulder blades travel forward between reps, without letting your chest leave the pad.
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 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 45 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 45 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 45 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 45 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 45 kg | Load up 45 kg → 50 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 5 kg to 50 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 row worse than a free weight row?
For the muscles it trains, no. What a machine takes away is the work of holding yourself in position, which is a cost on a bent-over row and not a benefit that transfers automatically. If your lower back is the reason your rowing stops, this is the row to take.
How many sets a week should I do of rows?
More weekly sets keep buying more size and strength with the returns shrinking as the count rises, and spreading them over more days matters much less for size than the total does1. Reckoner sets the number from your plan and what you logged.
Wide overhand or close neutral handles?
Both, if the machine has them. A close neutral grip keeps the elbows tight and favors the lats. A wide overhand grip pulls the elbows out and gives the rear shoulders and mid back more. Alternate between blocks rather than within a set.
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
- Pelland and colleagues, Sports Medicine, 2025. The resistance training dose response: meta-regressions exploring the effects of weekly volume and frequency on muscle hypertrophy and strength gains sixty-seven studies and 2058 participants, with size and strength both rising as weekly set volume rises and both showing diminishing returns, and weekly frequency compatible with a negligible effect on size once volume is accounted for