reckonerSeated cable row
Sit down, feet on the plate, and pull a handle to your belly. It is the row nearly every gym has and nearly everybody does wrong, because the seat lets you rock and rocking makes a heavy weight feel possible.
Tall chest, pull to the belly.
- Pattern
- Horizontal pull
- Trains
- Lats, upper back
- Kit
- Cable
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 6 to 10 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the feet and sit tall
Feet flat on the plate, knees slightly bent rather than locked, hips back against the pad. Sit up straight with a tall chest, which is the cue on your wrist, and take that position before you take the handle.
Reach out and let the blades travel
Take the handle with straight arms and let your shoulder blades slide forward around your ribs. Your torso stays where you set it. The reach comes from the shoulders, not the spine.
Pull the elbows past your ribs
Drive the elbows straight back and let the handle arrive at your stomach, level with the top of your hips. Shoulder blades squeeze together at the end, chest still tall, and pause there for a beat.
Let it out under control
Return slowly until the arms are straight and the blades have opened again. Full range beats a shortened one on every outcome that has been pooled2, and on this machine the shortened end is always the one at the front.
What goes wrong
Rocking back and forth with the weight
The torso swings behind vertical to start the pull and folds forward to return it, and what looks like a heavy row is a bad sit-up with a handle in it. If you have to rock, take the pin up one.
Shrugging at the finish
The shoulders climb towards the ears as the handle arrives and the upper traps take a pull the lats and mid back were meant to have. Keep the collarbones wide and the shoulders down.
Cutting the reach at the front
Holding the handle close with the blades pinned keeps tension on the arms and skips the lengthened part of the rep. Let the shoulder blades go forward, and keep the spine out of it.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 50 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 6 at 50 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. |
| 2 | 4 x 7 at 50 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. |
| 3 | 4 x 8 at 50 kg | 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. |
| 4 | 4 x 9 at 50 kg | 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. |
| 5 | 4 x 10 at 50 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 10 at 50 kg | Load up 50 kg → 55 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 5 kg to 55 kg and reps reset to six. 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
Where should the handle finish?
At your stomach, not your chest. The lats extend the shoulder1, so an elbow path close to your sides suits them. Pulling high to the sternum with the elbows flared makes it a rear shoulder and mid back exercise, which is a fine thing to do deliberately and a poor thing to do by accident.
Is this a good substitute for a barbell row?
For the back it does much the same job. What it removes is the hinge, and the hinge is where the lower back cost of a bent-over row comes from3. If your lower back is the thing that fails first, this is the swap.
Wide bar or close V handle?
Both are rows. The close neutral handle tends to keep the elbows tight and favors a belly-height finish. A wide overhand bar pulls the elbows out and up. Choose one and stay with it so the load you log means the same thing next week.
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
- Wu and Bordoni, StatPearls, National Library of Medicine, 2023. Anatomy, shoulder and upper limb, scapulohumeral muscles the latissimus dorsi running from the lower thoracic and lumbar spine, the bottom of the ribcage and the rim of the pelvis to the front of the upper arm bone, and being the shoulder's most important adductor, extensor and internal rotator
- 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
- Fenwick, Brown and McGill, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2009. Comparison of different rowing exercises: trunk muscle activation and lumbar spine motion, load, and stiffness seven men instrumented through three rows, with the standing bent-over row producing the highest measured compression at the fourth and fifth lumbar joint at 3576 newtons against 2457 for the standing one-armed cable row and 2339 for the inverted row, the inverted row producing the highest latissimus dorsi, upper back and hip extensor activation of the three, and the one-armed cable row producing the largest twisting challenge