reckonerSingle-leg Romanian deadlift
Stand on one leg and hinge, letting the free leg travel back behind you as a counterweight. Balance is the obvious difficulty and it is not the point. The point is that one hip has to resist rotating open, which no two legged hinge asks of you.
Keep the hips square as you hinge.
- Pattern
- Hinge
- Trains
- Hamstrings, glutes
- Kit
- Bodyweight
- Loading
- Your own bodyweight
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 5 to 8 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- Nothing to add, so the sets climb instead
- Skill
- Technical
- Recovery cost
- Low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Lower back, hip
Muscles worked
How to do it
Stand on one leg with a soft knee
Weight through the whole foot, a small bend in the standing knee that will stay there. Fix your eyes on a point on the floor a couple of paces ahead.
Hinge forward and let the back leg rise
Push the standing hip backwards and let the free leg travel straight back behind you. Your torso and that leg move together, as one line from head to heel.
Keep the hips square as you hinge
That is the cue on your wrist and it is the hard part. The hip of the free leg wants to roll open toward the ceiling. Point the toes of the free leg at the floor and it is much easier to feel when it happens.
Come back to standing under control
Drive the standing hip forward and bring the free leg down without letting it swing. Finish the reps on that leg before you swap.
What goes wrong
Letting the hip roll open
It makes the rep easier and it takes the exercise away, because resisting that rotation is most of what a single leg hinge trains. If you cannot keep the hips level, reduce how far down you go until you can.
Reaching for the floor with your hand
The hand does not need to touch anything. Reaching down turns it into a stretch you are performing rather than a hinge you are controlling, and it usually comes with a rounded back and an open hip at the same time.
Hurrying it
Balance takes a second to find on every rep, and this is a movement where a wobble is information rather than a nuisance. Set up, find the foot, then hinge. A fast set of these trains very little.
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 | 4 x 5 | 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 | 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 | 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 | One more set 4 → 5 setsYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7 and there is no weight left to add. When a lift runs out of load, the set is the increment, so it does five sets next week. |
| 5 | 5 x 8 | 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 | 3 x 8 | Holding steady No changeYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7 and there is no load left to add to this lift. It stays at eight reps while Reckoner looks for the next lever. The lighter week is over, so this is back to five 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
How do I make this harder without weights?
Slow it down, pause at the bottom, and go further only as far as the hips stay square. After that, hold a weight in the hand opposite the standing leg, which increases the rotation you have to resist rather than just the load. Reckoner records this as a bodyweight movement, so log what you actually did.
What is this for?
It is a hamstring and glute exercise that also asks one hip to hold you square. That makes it useful alongside two legged hinges rather than instead of them, because a barbell Romanian deadlift lets a stronger side quietly take over and this one does not.
Will Reckoner give me this with a hip restriction?
No. Lower back and hip are both recorded against it. Declare either in setup and it comes 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.