reckonerReverse hyperextension
The back extension turned around. Your chest stays still on the pad and your legs swing up behind you. In one study it drew more glute, hamstring and lower back activity than the regular hyperextension1, and it trains those muscles without a weight pressing down through your spine2.
Squeeze the glutes, legs up to level.
- Pattern
- Hinge
- Trains
- Glutes, hamstrings, spinal erectors
- Kit
- Reverse hyper
- 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
- Technical
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Lower back
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set up at the edge
Lie face down with your hips right at the edge of the pad and your legs hanging free. Hold the handles and keep your chest on the pad.
Lift with the glutes
Keep your legs straight and squeeze your glutes to raise them behind you.
Stop at level
Stop when your legs line up with your body. Higher than that, the lift comes from arching your lower back.
Lower and let the swing settle
Lower your legs under control. If the machine has a pendulum, let it come to rest before the next rep instead of riding it back up.
What goes wrong
Riding the swing
The pendulum makes it easy to throw the legs up and catch the rebound, which feels smooth. Then the swing is doing the lifting, not your glutes. Start every rep from still.
Piling weight on the strap
More weight feels like progress. In one study, going from bodyweight to one and a half times bodyweight changed little, and the heavier loads bent the hips and trunk further at the bottom2. Get the reps clean first.
Lifting the chest off the pad
Raising your head and chest feels like helping. Your chest is the fixed end of this lift, and when it comes up the rep turns into a whole body arch. Keep it down and hold the handles.
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 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 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
Reverse hyper or back extension?
In one study the reverse hyper drew 34 to 71 per cent more peak activity in the glutes, hamstrings and lower back than the hyperextension1. More activity is not proven extra growth, and no training study has compared the two, so treat it as a harder option rather than a better one.
Does it load the spine?
Not by pressing down on it the way a squat does2. Your lower back does bend and straighten as your legs swing, and more so with heavier loads2, so keep the range smooth and the weight modest.
Will Reckoner put this in my plan?
It can, once you are past the beginner stage, when your gym has a reverse hyper. It is not on any gym preset, so tick it in your equipment checklist, or tick the hyper bench line if one bench does all three. Lower back is recorded against it, so declaring it in setup takes it out of your plan.
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
- Cuthbert and colleagues, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2021. Electromyographical Differences Between the Hyperextension and Reverse-Hyperextension ten adults, where the reverse hyperextension produced 34 to 71 per cent greater peak activity than the hyperextension in the erector spinae, gluteus maximus and biceps femoris
- Lawrence, Somma and Swanson, Journal of Applied Biomechanics, 2022. Effect of Load on Muscle Activity, Kinematics, and Force Production During the Reverse Hyperextension Exercise twenty adults at half, one and one and a half times bodyweight: the exercise trains the posterior chain without axial spine load, heavier loads added hip and trunk flexion, and few differences were found between the two heavier loads