reckonerSeated neutral-grip dumbbell press
The seated dumbbell press with the palms facing each other instead of forward. One wrist turned, nothing else changed. It is worth knowing up front that the common claim for it, that turning the palms in is kinder to the shoulder, has never been tested in an overhead press.
Ribs down, press straight overhead.
- Pattern
- Vertical push
- Trains
- Front delts, triceps
- Kit
- Dumbbell, bench
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 6 to 10 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Shoulder
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set up exactly as you would to press palms forward
Backrest upright or one notch off it, bells kicked up off the thighs, shoulder blades set into the pad, feet flat on the floor and pushing.
Turn the palms to face each other and leave them
Thumbs toward you, little fingers away. The grip is the whole difference between this movement and the one next to it in the library, so it holds for every rep of every set.
Start at about ear height with the elbows in front of the ribs
The neutral grip pulls the elbows in naturally. Let it. If they are still flared out to the sides you are doing the palms-forward press with your wrists turned.
Press straight up and bring the bells together
They travel closer to each other than they do palms forward and finish over the shoulders, close and not touching. Lower under control to ear height.
What goes wrong
Letting the grip rotate back partway through the set
It happens on the last two reps of a hard set and it happens quietly. If the palms end up half forward you have logged this movement and trained the other one, and the two lanes stop meaning anything.
Reaching for it because your shoulder hurts
There is no evidence that a neutral grip protects a shoulder in an overhead press, and a page cannot examine you. Reckoner does not prescribe this movement at all to somebody who has declared shoulder trouble, which is a decision the profile makes rather than a decision you make in the gym.
Flaring the elbows wide anyway
Wide elbows and a neutral grip is a wrist position with none of the arm position that goes with it. If the elbows want to be out, press palms forward and stop fighting it.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 16 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 16 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 16 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 16 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 16 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 16 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 16 kg | Load up 16 kg → 18 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2 kg to 18 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
Is a neutral grip better for the shoulder?
Nobody has measured it in an overhead press. The closest thing in the literature is a comparison of grips in horizontal pressing, and there the front of the shoulder showed no significant difference in activity across any grip or machine tested1. Treat the neutral grip as a comfort choice you are allowed to make, not as a fix somebody proved.
Does it train a different muscle from the palms-forward press?
Not as far as anyone has shown. The library records the same primary muscles for both, and the honest version of the difference is that they feel different in the same shoulder on the same day.
Then why keep both in the library?
Because feeling different is a real reason to have both, and because a swap needs somewhere to go. When a seated press stalls twice, Reckoner offers you one of the others in the group, and the neutral grip is the smallest change it can offer.
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
- Muyor, Rodríguez-Ridao and Oliva-Lozano, Journal of Human Kinetics, 2023. Comparison of Muscle Activity between the Horizontal Bench Press and the Seated Chest Press Exercises Using Several Grips anterior deltoid activity not differing significantly across any exercise or grip tested, neutral and prone alike