reckonerOne-arm landmine row
One end of a barbell pinned in a landmine or a corner, the other end in one hand, rowed out of a hinge. The bar swings on a fixed arc, so there is one less direction to steer, and rowing a side at a time lets you load one arm harder than a bar across both would.
Row to the hip, keep the shoulders square.
- Pattern
- Horizontal pull
- Trains
- Lats, upper back
- Kit
- Landmine, barbell
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 6 to 10 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2.5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Lower back
Muscles worked
How to do it
Anchor the bar and stand beside it
Set one end in the landmine sleeve, or wedge it into a corner with a plate holding it down. Load the far end last. Stand so the bar runs back past your hip rather than straight out in front of you.
Hinge and take the sleeve
Push the hips back, soft knees, chest down and back flat. Take the end of the bar just under the collar and let the arm hang straight. The free hand can rest on your thigh, and the shoulders stay level either way.
Row to your hip
Row to the hip, keep the shoulders square, which is the cue on your wrist. The elbow travels back past your ribs and the bar arrives somewhere near the hip rather than the chest, because that is where the arc puts it.
Refuse to be turned
One arm pulling means the load wants to rotate you. Of three rows measured with instruments, the standing one-armed cable row made the largest twisting demand on the trunk1, and this one asks the same question. Your job between reps is to keep your chest facing the floor.
Lower until the arm is straight, then change hands
Let the shoulder blade travel forward at the bottom before the next rep. Finish one side and go straight into the other rather than resting in between.
What goes wrong
Letting the working shoulder come up and around
The easiest way to move more weight on a one-arm row is to open the chest towards the working side and finish with the shoulders stacked. It buys range, and the range comes from your spine rotating. Square shoulders, less weight, better row.
Rowing to the chest
The bar is pinned at one end, so it travels an arc that finishes near your hip. Dragging it up to your chest fights that arc, pulls the elbow away from your ribs and turns a lat exercise into a rear shoulder one.
Forgetting it is still a bent-over row
Nothing holds your torso up but you, for the whole set, on both sides. Among three rows measured for spine load, the standing bent-over pattern put the most through the lower back1, and pinning one end of the bar does not change who is holding the hinge.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 25 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 25 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 25 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 25 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 25 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 25 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 25 kg | Load up 25 kg → 27.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 27.5 kg. The weight went up, so the reps come down to six. You are now working 6 to 10. 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 this the same thing as a T-bar row?
Same bar and the same anchor, different exercise. A T-bar row takes a handle around the bar in both hands, so the torso stays square by itself and the load is shared. This one puts a single hand on the end of the bar, which lets you load a side harder and asks your trunk to stop you rotating. Both are recognized variations of the landmine row in the coaching literature2, and both are separate movements in Reckoner with separate records.
Do I need a landmine attachment?
No. A corner will do, with a plate or a heavy dumbbell holding the end of the bar down and a folded towel between the bar and the wall. What matters is that the anchored end cannot slide while you pull.
Reckoner is not giving me this. Why?
Lower back is the restriction recorded against it. Declare one in setup and the bent-over rows come out of your plan while the supported ones stay in.
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
- Fenwick, Brown and McGill, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2009. Comparison of different rowing exercises: trunk muscle activation and lumbar spine motion, load, and stiffness seven men instrumented through three rows, with the standing bent-over row producing the highest measured compression at the fourth and fifth lumbar joint at 3576 newtons against 2457 for the standing one-armed cable row and 2339 for the inverted row, and the one-armed cable row producing the largest twisting challenge to the trunk musculature
- Lincoln, Sapstead, Moore and Weldon, Strength and Conditioning Journal, 2023. Exercise technique: the landmine row the National Strength and Conditioning Association's own technique column on the landmine row, which describes it as an upper-body pulling exercise using a barbell as a lever and sets out technique, cueing and programming for its common variations