reckonerPallof press
Stand side on to a cable, hold the handle at your chest, and press it straight out in front of you. The cable spends the whole set trying to rotate you toward the stack, and refusing that rotation is the entire exercise. Nothing visible happens, which is why it is so often done wrong.
Press straight out, resist the twist.
- Pattern
- Core anti-extension
- Trains
- Obliques, abs
- Kit
- Cable
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 8 to 12 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2.5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Very low
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set up side on at chest height
Pulley at roughly chest height, feet about shoulder width, side to the stack, far enough out that the cable is already pulling before you start. Hands stacked on the handle against your sternum.
Brace and square up
Squeeze the glutes, pull the ribs down, and make sure your shoulders and hips are facing straight ahead. Everything in the set is about keeping them that way.
Press straight out
Extend the arms in front of your chest. As the handle gets further from your body the twisting force grows, so the hardest part of the rep is the end of it.
Hold, then come back without turning
Pause with the arms out, then bring the handle back to your chest with the shoulders still square. If you rotated at any point, that rep did not count.
What goes wrong
Letting the shoulders turn toward the stack
It happens gradually and it is almost impossible to feel. The press gets easier because the cable has straightened out in front of you, which means the twist you were resisting has been given away.
Standing too close to the stack
Close in, the cable barely pulls sideways and the exercise becomes a slightly awkward chest press. Step out until you can feel the pull before the first rep.
Loading it until you have to lean
Too much weight and the whole body tips away from the stack to counterbalance. Once you are leaning, the position is doing the resisting rather than the trunk.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 10 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 | 3 x 8 at 10 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. |
| 2 | 3 x 9 at 10 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. |
| 3 | 3 x 10 at 10 kg | More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 11 at 10 kg | More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 12 at 10 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 12 at 10 kg | Load up 10 kg → 12.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 12.5 kg and reps reset to eight. The lighter week is over, so this is back to three 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 does the Pallof press actually train?
Resisting rotation, which is a job the trunk does constantly and which almost no other exercise in a gym loads directly. Nobody has published measurements on this particular movement, and saying so is more use than an invented number. The mechanics are plain enough: the cable pulls you into a twist and you do not let it.
Why does it not feel like much?
Because nothing moves, and effort without movement reads as easy. Step further from the stack, extend fully, and hold the end position for a couple of seconds. If it is still easy, the load is too light.
How does Reckoner progress this?
By adding weight on the stack the way it would with any cable movement, once the reps say you have finished the range at the current one. The table above is a real run rather than a description of one.
Similar movements
Reckoner has no other movement in this swap group.