reckonerProne floor row
Lie face down, lift your chest a little, and row your elbows back off the floor. There is no weight and no bar, and it is still the cheapest way to make the muscles between your shoulder blades work when there is nothing in the room.
Lift the chest, squeeze the blades.
- Pattern
- Horizontal pull
- Trains
- Upper back, rear delts
- Kit
- Bodyweight, floor
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 8 to 12 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- Nothing to add, so the sets climb instead
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Very low
Muscles worked
How to do it
Lie face down with your arms out
Forehead down or chin lightly tucked, arms bent at about ninety degrees with the elbows out to the sides. Legs relaxed, glutes lightly on.
Lift the chest a small amount
Raise the breastbone off the floor by a couple of inches. Lift the chest, which is the cue on your wrist. This is not a back extension and your ribs should not be leaving the ground.
Row the elbows back and squeeze
Pull the elbows down towards your back pockets and pinch the shoulder blades together. Hold that squeeze for two or three seconds. The pause is where the exercise lives, because there is nothing else to make it hard.
Lower the arms and reset
Let the arms come back to the floor, relax for a moment, and start the next one from a dead stop. Bouncing off the floor turns the set into a rhythm and removes the work.
What goes wrong
Turning it into a back extension
The chest climbs, the lower back arches hard, and the arms come along for the ride. The lift of the chest is small and deliberate, and what moves is the shoulder blades.
Rushing the reps
Without load, the only variables you have are the range and the time you hold the top. Fast reps take away both. Slow down and hold the squeeze.
Expecting it to replace a loaded row
It cannot, and it is not meant to. It is the movement for a hotel room, an injury week or a warm-up, and Reckoner treats it as a low cost, low skill item rather than a substitute for something you can load.
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 | 3 x 8 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | One more set 2 → 4 setsYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7 and there is no weight left to add. When a lift runs out of load, the set is the increment, so it does four sets next week. |
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 worth doing if I have a gym?
As a warm-up or a filler, yes. As your main upper back work, no. Lying face down with the arms overhead or out to the side is the family of positions that produced the greatest middle and lower trapezius activity in an EMG comparison of ten exercises1, so the position is a good one. What it lacks is a way to keep adding load.
How do I make it harder?
Hold the squeeze longer, slow the lowering, and pause on the floor between reps. Beyond that the honest answer is to find something to pull, because there is no load to add.
Should I lift my legs too?
No. Lifting the legs turns it into a lower back exercise, and this one is about the shoulder blades. Keep the legs on the floor and the range small and deliberate.
Similar movements
There is no load to ease on this lift, so Reckoner offers one of these the first time it stalls. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Ekstrom, Donatelli and Soderberg, Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy, 2003. Surface electromyographic analysis of exercises for the trapezius and serratus anterior muscles thirty healthy subjects measured across ten exercises, with the unilateral shoulder shrug producing the greatest upper trapezius activity, and the greatest middle trapezius amplitudes coming from horizontal extension with external rotation and from an overhead arm raise lying face down, which also produced the greatest lower trapezius activity