reckonerRomanian deadlift
Stand up with the bar, push the hips back, let the bar travel down your legs until the hamstrings tell you to stop. It is a hinge and not a squat: the knees stay softly bent throughout and barely change angle, so the whole movement happens at the hip.
Hinge to the hamstring stretch, no further.
- Pattern
- Hinge
- Trains
- Hamstrings, glutes, spinal erectors
- Kit
- Barbell
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 5 to 8 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
- Lower back, hip
Muscles worked
How to do it
Start standing with the bar
Take it out of a rack or deadlift it up first. This lift starts at the top, which is what separates it from a deadlift. Feet about hip width, bar against your thighs, shoulders back.
Soften the knees and leave them there
A small bend, then stop. From here the knee angle should hardly change. If your knees keep bending as the bar goes down, you have started squatting the weight instead of hinging it.
Push the hips back and let the bar slide down
Hips travel backwards, chest comes down as a consequence. The bar stays in contact with your legs the whole way. Back flat, shoulders pulled back so the bar cannot drift forward.
Hinge to the hamstring stretch, no further
That is the cue on your wrist, and it is a stopping rule rather than a depth target. The moment you feel the hamstrings run out of length, that is the bottom of your rep, wherever the bar happens to be.
Drive the hips forward to stand
Push the hips back under you and stand tall. Do not lean back at the top. The rep finishes when you are standing upright, not past it.
What goes wrong
Chasing the floor
The bar does not have to touch anything. How far it travels is decided by your hamstrings, and for most people that is somewhere around the middle of the shin. Going lower than your hamstrings allow means your lower back is providing the extra range, and that is the one thing this lift must never do.
Rounding the back to get more range
The flat back is the whole safety condition of a loaded hinge, and it is the first thing to go when you want the bar lower. If your back rounds before you feel a stretch, shorten the range and work on it there, or take weight off the bar.
Treating it as interchangeable with a leg curl
They train the hamstrings differently and both are worth having. Across ten hamstring exercises measured by electrodes and then by MRI, hip extension patterns like this one preferentially recruited the long head of biceps femoris, while knee bending patterns favored the semitendinosus instead1. Doing one is not doing the other.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 70 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 | 4 x 5 at 70 kg | More reps 5 → 6 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 4 x 6 at 70 kg | More reps 6 → 7 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 4 x 7 at 70 kg | More reps 7 → 8 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 4 x 8 at 70 kg | Load up 70 kg → 72.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 72.5 kg and reps reset to five. |
| 5 | 4 x 5 at 72.5 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 5 at 72.5 kg | More reps 5 → 6 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. The lighter week is over, so this is back to four 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
Romanian deadlift or conventional deadlift?
Different lifts with different jobs. The conventional deadlift starts on the floor and is a whole body pull. This one starts standing, keeps a fixed knee angle and is a hamstring and glute exercise. They are separate movements here with separate records.
How far down should the bar go?
To wherever your hamstrings stop you with a flat back, and no further. That point moves as you get more range, so it is a sensation rather than a measurement. If you want the range to grow, the bar getting lower over months is the evidence, not a target you force this week.
Will Reckoner give me this with a lower back restriction?
No. Lower back and hip are both recorded against it. Declare either in setup and it comes out of your plan, along with the good morning and the dumbbell version, which record the same thing.
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
- Bourne and colleagues, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2017. Impact of exercise selection on hamstring muscle activation twenty-four men measured across ten hamstring exercises by surface electrodes and then by MRI, hip extension patterns preferentially recruiting the long head of biceps femoris and the Nordic curl preferentially recruiting the semitendinosus instead