reckonerOverhead carry
A weight pressed overhead and held there while you walk. It is the least forgiving carry in the library: the shoulder has to stay in a good position, the ribs have to stay down, and the back arches the moment either one gives.
Arms locked, ribs down, stand tall.
- Pattern
- Carry
- Trains
- Side delts, abs, traps
- Kit
- Dumbbell or kettlebell
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 holds of 30 to 60 seconds, on the fat loss plan. Reckoner does not prescribe this pattern for muscle or strength.
- Progression step
- 10 seconds on the hold
- Skill
- Technical
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Shoulder, neck, lower back
Muscles worked
How to do it
Press the weight up properly
Get the dumbbells to the shoulders first, then press them overhead until the elbows are locked and the arms are beside your ears rather than in front of your face.
Pull the ribs down before you step
With weight overhead the back wants to arch to get the arms back. Squeeze the glutes, tuck the ribs toward the hips, and stand so the load is over the middle of your feet.
Walk short and slow
Small steps, eyes forward, breathing normally. Every step is a chance for the position to drift, and this is not a carry to hurry.
Stop the moment the arms drift forward
The elbows softening or the arms coming forward of the ears means the set is done. Log the time you held it properly and put the weight down under control.
What goes wrong
Arching the back to get the arms overhead
If your shoulders will not go straight up, the spine will lend you the range. It looks like an overhead position and it is a lower back position with the arms attached.
Loading it like a farmer's carry
The weight that is trivial hanging at your side is a great deal harder held above your head. Start much lighter than feels sensible and let the engine take it up.
Doing it when the shoulder is unhappy
This is the movement in the library that asks the most of an overhead position. If pressing overhead already bothers you, a front-rack carry trains the same walking brace with the arms out of it.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 16 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 30 s at 16 kg | Longer hold 30 → 40 sYou carried the full time at RPE 7, so the carry gains ten seconds. Once it reaches 60 seconds the load goes up instead. |
| 2 | 4 x 40 s at 16 kg | Longer hold 40 → 50 sYou carried the full time at RPE 7, so the carry gains ten seconds. Once it reaches 60 seconds the load goes up instead. |
| 3 | 4 x 50 s at 16 kg | Longer hold 50 → 60 sYou carried the full time at RPE 7, so the carry gains ten seconds. Once it reaches 60 seconds the load goes up instead. |
| 4 | 4 x 60 s at 16 kg | Load up 16 kg → 18 kgYou carried the top of the window at RPE 7, so the load goes up 2 kg to 18 kg and the carry drops back to 30 seconds. Given the choice between heavier and longer, a loaded lift gets heavier. |
| 5 | 4 x 30 s at 18 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 30 s at 18 kg | Longer hold 30 → 40 sYou carried the full time at RPE 7, so the carry gains ten seconds. Once it reaches 60 seconds the load goes up instead. 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
What is the point of carrying something overhead?
It loads a walking brace in the hardest position available, with the shoulders holding a locked-out weight the whole time. Nobody has published measurements on this particular carry, so there is no number here to give you for it. Trunk training as a category produces small to moderate improvements in strength, sprint speed and change of direction in athletes1.
One arm or two?
The library carries the two-armed version, which is the balanced one. One-sided carrying adds a large sideways load to the low back, and the suitcase carry is where that belongs deliberately rather than here as an afterthought2.
Why is it prescribed in seconds?
Because a carry is performed against a clock, so it progresses on the axis it is actually done on. The engine adds seconds to the walk the same way it adds weight to a bar.
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
- Saeterbakken and colleagues, Sports Medicine, 2022. The effects of trunk muscle training on physical fitness and sport-specific performance in young and adult athletes: a systematic review and meta-analysis thirty-one controlled trials and 693 athletes aged eleven to thirty-seven, with trunk muscle training producing significant small to large improvements in maximal strength, local muscular endurance, lower limb power, linear sprint speed and change of direction, and a moderate effect on sport-specific performance
- McGill, Marshall and Andersen, Ergonomics, 2013. Low back loads while walking and carrying: comparing the load carried in one hand or in both hands six participants walking with buckets, where thirty kilograms carried in one hand pushed low back compression above 2800 newtons while the same total split between both hands brought it to 1570, a reduction of 44 per cent, and where doubling the total by carrying thirty kilograms in each hand still produced less spine compression than thirty in one