reckonerMachine shoulder press
The overhead press with the path already chosen. A machine takes away the balancing and gives you back attention, which is worth having on the day you are tired and worth knowing about on the day you are not.
Press without shrugging the shoulders.
- Pattern
- Vertical push
- Trains
- Front delts, triceps
- Kit
- Machine shoulder 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
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Shoulder
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the seat before you set the pin
Raise or lower the seat until the handles start at about shoulder height when you are sitting against the pad. That one adjustment decides the range of the whole set, and it is the one people leave where the last person put it.
Sit into the pad and get the feet down
Back flat against the backrest, feet flat on the floor, hips right at the back of the seat. Sliding forward to reach the handles turns a supported press into an unsupported one with a pad behind you doing nothing.
Press up without shrugging
Drive the handles up until the elbows are nearly straight, keeping the shoulders down away from the ears. That is the cue Reckoner puts on your wrist and it is what stops the traps taking a press off you.
Come back down to shoulder height and stop
Lower under control until the handles are back where they started. Do not let the plates touch down between reps: the moment the stack rests, the working weight is on the machine rather than on you.
What goes wrong
Leaving the seat where the last person had it
Too low and you start with the handles above your ears and lose the bottom of the movement. Too high and you cannot finish. It is ten seconds of adjustment against a whole block of a shorter lift.
Shrugging the last few inches
The stack goes up, the shoulders go up with it, and the traps have quietly taken the top of the rep. Keep the shoulders down and let the elbows finish the press. If they will not, the pin is one hole too deep.
Treating it as the lesser lift
Across thirteen trials and over a thousand people, machine training and free-weight training produced no detectable difference in muscle growth1. Where they differ is what you get tested on: free-weight training improved free-weight tests more, and machine training tended to improve machine tests more1.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 30 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 30 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 30 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 30 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 30 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 30 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 30 kg | Load up 30 kg → 35 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 5 kg to 35 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
Machine or dumbbells?
For size, the evidence says it does not much matter: the meta-analysis found no difference in hypertrophy between the two1. For the shoulder specifically, the shoulder press versions that demand the most stability produce the highest deltoid activity and the lowest weight lifted2, and a machine sits at the far end of that scale in the other direction. Nobody has measured a shoulder press machine against dumbbells directly, so that last part is reasoning rather than a result.
Why does the weight jump so much between sets?
Because a stack moves in whole pins and nothing smaller exists on the machine. The fact block at the top of this page prints exactly what one pin is worth on this movement, and Reckoner will never prescribe you a weight that falls between two of them.
What does Reckoner do when this lift stalls?
It eases the pin and lets you rebuild toward the weight you were stuck at. It has nothing to rotate you to: this is the only machine vertical press in the library, so its swap group has one movement in it and the reset is the whole answer.
Similar movements
Reckoner has no other movement in this swap group.
Sources
- 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 finding no significant difference in hypertrophy between free-weight and machine-based training, with free-weight tests improving more after free-weight training and machine tests tending to improve more after machine training
- Saeterbakken and Fimland, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2013. Effects of body position and loading modality on muscle activity and strength in shoulder presses the shoulder press variation with the greatest stability requirement showing the highest deltoid activity and the lowest one repetition maximum