reckonerPull-up
One bar and your own bodyweight. It trains the lats, the upper back and the biceps harder than anything else that needs no kit, and it is the movement people most often measure themselves by.
Palms away, wrists straight in the hang.
- Pattern
- Vertical pull
- Trains
- Lats, upper back, biceps
- Kit
- Bodyweight, pull up bar
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 6 to 10 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- Nothing to add, so the sets climb instead
- Skill
- Technical
- Recovery cost
- High
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Shoulder, elbow
Muscles worked
How to do it
Hang properly first
Palms away, hands a little wider than your shoulders, wrists straight rather than bent over the bar. Hang with your arms straight and then pull your shoulder blades down, so you are hanging from your back rather than from your joints.
Set the body
Squeeze the glutes, brace the belly, and cross or lightly bend your legs. A pull-up is a moving plank, and a body that is swinging is a body that is not pulling.
Pull the elbows to your ribs
Lead with the elbows, not the chin. Drive them down and back until your chin clears the bar, and keep your chest up toward it rather than craning your neck over it.
Come down under control
Lower all the way to straight arms. Pooled comparisons of full and partial range training favor the full range, slightly but consistently1, and the bottom is the part people cut first.
What goes wrong
Kipping without meaning to
A little swing sneaks in around rep five and the reps after it are a different exercise. If you have to swing, the set is finished, and the honest number is the one before the swing.
Stopping short at the bottom
Half reps make the set feel productive and leave the hardest part of the range untrained. Straight arms every time, then pull.
Chasing the chin over the bar with your neck
It adds nothing and it teaches you to finish with your shoulders rolled forward. Chest toward the bar, chin follows.
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 | 4 x 6 | First week Where the run starts. Nothing is logged yet, so nothing has changed. |
| 2 | 4 x 7 | More reps 6 → 7 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 | 4 x 8 | More reps 7 → 8 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 | 4 x 9 | 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. |
| 5 | 4 x 10 | 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. |
| 6 | 2 x 10 | Deload 4 → 2 setsFive 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. |
| Next | 5 x 10 | One more set 2 → 5 setsYou hit the top of the range and there is no weight left to add. When a lift runs out of load, the set is the increment, so it does five 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
I cannot do a single one. Where do I start?
The lat pull-down and the assisted pull-up are both in the library and both build the same pattern with a load you choose. Tell Reckoner what your gym has and it picks the one you can actually run.
What does Reckoner do once I can do ten?
It climbs the rep range first, then adds a set, because bodyweight has no load to add. Past that, the weighted pull-up is in the same swap group and takes a belt or a vest.
Chin-up or pull-up?
The chin-up, palms toward you, is the easier of the two and gives the biceps more of the work. They share a swap group. Each lift keeps its own record in Reckoner. Swapping between them loses neither record and merges neither, and the lift you swap to opens at its own weight if you have trained it before.
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
- Wolf and colleagues, International Journal of Strength and Conditioning, 2023. Partial vs full range of motion resistance training: a systematic review and meta-analysis a meta-analysis reporting a trivial standardized mean difference of 0.12 in favor of full range training, with every outcome favoring full range but all effects between trivial and small, and a subgroup suggesting partials held at long muscle lengths may match or beat full range for size