reckonerPush press
An overhead press where your legs start the bar. A short dip and a hard drive get it moving, and your arms finish what your hips began1. It trains getting force from the floor into the bar fast, which is a different job from the strict press.
Dip the knees, drive the bar up.
- Pattern
- Vertical push
- Trains
- Front delts, triceps
- Kit
- Barbell, rack
- 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
- Bar
- 20 kg
- Skill
- Technical
- Recovery cost
- High
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Shoulder, lower back, wrist, elbow, neck
Muscles worked
How to do it
Start with the bar on your shoulders
Unrack it onto the front of your shoulders, hands a little outside shoulder width, elbows a little in front of the bar. The bar has to sit on you rather than in your hands, because the legs can only drive what is resting on the body. Feet about hip width, whole foot down.
Dip straight down, a short way
Bend your knees a few inches with your chest up and your torso upright. It is a quick partial squat, not a sit, and it is how the legs hand the bar its speed1.
Drive hard, then press through
Straighten your legs fast, and as the bar leaves your shoulders, press it the rest of the way. The arms take over from the legs, so the press starts where the drive runs out. Move your head back out of its path, then through once the bar has passed.
Finish over the middle of your feet
Lock out with the bar over your mid foot and your ears between your arms, where it balances with the least effort. Lower it to your shoulders under control, soften the knees to take it, and reset before the next dip.
What goes wrong
Dipping forward onto the toes
Leaning forward feels like loading up for a bigger drive. The chest drops, the knees shoot forward and the bar drives out in front of you, so you spend the rep chasing it. Keep the dip vertical with your weight mid foot. In the jerk, which starts with the same dip, a strictly vertical dip is one of the things that separates experienced lifters from novices1.
Turning the dip into a squat
A deeper dip feels like it should store more power. The bar sinks into you before it ever moves up. Keep it short and fast.
Pressing before the legs finish
Pressing early feels like getting a head start on a heavy bar. The arms end up pushing against a bar the legs are still driving, and you lose the drive. Let the legs finish first, then press.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 40 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 40 kg | 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. |
| 2 | 3 x 9 at 40 kg | 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. |
| 3 | 3 x 10 at 40 kg | More reps 10 → 11 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 | 3 x 11 at 40 kg | More reps 11 → 12 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 | 3 x 12 at 40 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 40 kg | Load up 40 kg → 42.5 kgYou hit the top of the range with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7), so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 42.5 kg. The weight went up, so the reps come down to ten. You are now working 8 to 12. 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
Push press or overhead press?
Different jobs. The strict press keeps your shoulders under the load for the whole rep. The push press lets the legs start it, so it trains producing force fast: in trained men its power output measured close to a loaded jump squat's2.
Will the push press build bigger shoulders?
No trial of the push press for muscle growth turned up on PubMed when this page was written, so this page does not claim it. If size is the goal, the strict press keeps your shoulders working the whole way up.
Will Reckoner put this in my plan?
Not by itself. It is a power lift and Reckoner has no power goal, so the engine never chooses it for you. Choose it in the lift picker or as a swap for the overhead press, and from then on it is logged and progressed with your other lifts.
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
- Soriano, Suchomel and Comfort, Sports Medicine, 2019. Weightlifting Overhead Pressing Derivatives: A Review of the Literature a review of thirteen studies describing the push press as the lower body producing force through a quick partial squat dip and a drive, transmitted through the trunk to the arms, which is its main difference from the standing press, and a strictly vertical dip as a key difference between expert and novice lifters in the jerk
- Lake, Mundy and Comfort, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2014. Power and impulse applied during push press exercise seventeen resistance trained men, with push press peak power not significantly different from the jump squat's and mean power about 9.5 per cent greater. Over five years old, and still the study that measured it