reckonerMachine torso rotation
Seated with your hips held, you turn the upper body against a stack. The library lists the obliques as the prime mover and the abs as the helpers. That is close to everything we can responsibly say about it: we did not find a study of this exact machine, so this page stays nearer to technique than most.
Hips still, turn slowly from the middle.
- Pattern
- Core rotation
- Trains
- Obliques
- Kit
- Machine torso rotation
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 2 sets of 8 to 12 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Very low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Lower back
Muscles worked
How to do it
Sit tall and set the hips
Sit upright with your back against the pad and your hips held in place by the machine, so they cannot move with you. If the hips can turn, the machine is not doing its job.
Set the stop to a range you control
If your machine lets you set the starting angle or the range, choose them so you can reach the end of the range and come back from it without a jerk. A smaller range you can own is better than a bigger one you cannot.
Turn slowly from the middle
Turn the upper body slowly, from the middle, and let the arms ride along instead of pulling. The hips stay where they are.
Return with control, then do the other side
Let the stack come back as slowly as it went out, and do not let it touch down between reps. Finish your sets on one side and then do the other.
What goes wrong
Turning with the hips and the legs
Letting the hips move a little feels like more range. The rotation is then coming from below the waist, and the part you set up to train does less of it.
Using speed
A fast pull gets the stack moving and the rep over, so the slow part, the return, ends up uncontrolled. The cue is a slow turn, and the slow part is where the control is.
Chasing the end of the range with a heavy stack
The library records the lower back as the area to take care with on this lift. The sensible stop is the one you can return from without a jerk, not the end of the machine's range.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, 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 | 2 x 8 | More reps 8 → 9 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 2 x 9 | More reps 9 → 10 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 2 x 10 | More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 2 x 11 | More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 2 x 12 | 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 | 1 x 12 | Load up — → 5 kgYou hit the top of the range with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7), so the weight on the machine goes up 5 kg to 5 kg. The weight went up, so the reps come down to eight. You are now working 8 to 12. The lighter week is over, so this is back to two 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
Will it slim my waist?
Training a muscle and uncovering it are two different jobs. In 24 sedentary adults who did seven abdominal exercises on five days a week for six weeks with food intake held level, abdominal endurance improved and abdominal circumference, body fat percentage and skinfolds did not change significantly1. The study did not test this machine, and it measured endurance rather than size. Whatever a rotation machine builds, what you can see is settled elsewhere.
Is it safe for my back?
We do not have a study of this machine to offer on either side. What we have is the library's flag: it records the lower back as the area to take care with on this lift, so if you have told Reckoner about a lower back restriction it is filtered out of plans and swaps as a hard rule, not a preference.
Will Reckoner put this machine in my plan?
Not by itself, and on purpose. The engine never places this machine for you: you reach it by choosing it in a swap or in the movement picker, and a lane you have put it on keeps it. Because you do it one side at a time, the library marks it as a one side lift and your sets are recorded as left and right.
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
- Vispute and colleagues, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2011. The effect of abdominal exercise on abdominal fat 24 sedentary adults doing seven abdominal exercises on five days a week for six weeks on an isocaloric diet, with no significant change in body fat, abdominal circumference or skinfolds and improved abdominal endurance