reckonerSled push
Load a sled and push it. There is no lowering phase at all: you press the whole way and then stop, which is unusual enough to change what the exercise costs you afterwards. It is recorded here in time rather than in repetitions, because a push is a distance rather than a count.
Stay low, drive through the legs.
- Pattern
- Carry
- Trains
- Quads, glutes, calves
- Kit
- Sled
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 holds of 30 to 60 seconds, on the fat loss plan. Reckoner does not prescribe this pattern for muscle or strength.
- Progression step
- 10 seconds on the hold
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- High
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Shoulder, knee
Muscles worked
How to do it
Load it lighter than you think
A sled that barely moves is a series of standing starts, and a sled that runs away from you is a jog. You want it heavy enough that it keeps moving under continuous effort.
Set your hands and get low
Hands on the uprights at about chest height for a taller push, low on the frame for a harder one. Stay low, drive through the legs. That is the cue on your wrist.
Lean into it with a straight line from head to heel
Arms firm, hips down, body angled forward. If your hips ride up and your back rounds, you are pushing with your spine instead of your legs.
Take short, hard steps
Drive the ground away behind you with short powerful strides rather than long reaching ones. Keep going for the time the plan gives you rather than to a distance you picked.
What goes wrong
Letting the hips rise
As you tire the hips come up, the angle flattens, and the push moves off your legs and onto your lower back and shoulders. When you feel that happening, the set is finished. Stopping early with the shape intact is the right call.
Reaching with long strides
A long stride means a moment where you are not pushing, and a heavy sled stops in that moment. Short steps keep continuous force on it, which is the whole mechanical trick of a sled.
Expecting it to leave you as sore as a squat
It will not, and that is a property of the exercise rather than of your effort. Soreness is driven mostly by the lowering half of a rep, and a sled has none: in a direct comparison, the arm trained with lowering repetitions had significantly more soreness and swelling than the arm trained with lifting repetitions1. A hard sled push that does not wreck you the next day still counted.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 40 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 30 s at 40 kg | Longer hold 30 → 40 sYou carried the full time at RPE 7, so the carry gains ten seconds. Once it reaches 60 seconds the load goes up instead. |
| 2 | 4 x 40 s at 40 kg | Longer hold 40 → 50 sYou carried the full time at RPE 7, so the carry gains ten seconds. Once it reaches 60 seconds the load goes up instead. |
| 3 | 4 x 50 s at 40 kg | Longer hold 50 → 60 sYou carried the full time at RPE 7, so the carry gains ten seconds. Once it reaches 60 seconds the load goes up instead. |
| 4 | 4 x 60 s at 40 kg | Load up 40 kg → 45 kgYou carried the top of the window at RPE 7, so the load goes up 5 kg to 45 kg and the carry drops back to 30 seconds. Given the choice between heavier and longer, a loaded lift gets heavier. |
| 5 | 4 x 30 s at 45 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 30 s at 45 kg | Longer hold 30 → 40 sYou carried the full time at RPE 7, so the carry gains ten seconds. Once it reaches 60 seconds the load goes up instead. 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
Why does Reckoner measure this in time and not reps?
Because a sled push has no repetitions. The library records it as a movement measured in time, so what gets logged is how long you pushed and what was on the sled, and progression works on the load.
How much should be on the sled?
Enough that it keeps moving under continuous hard effort for the whole set and no more. Reckoner steps this on its own sled ladder, so let the load come up over weeks rather than adding a plate because a set felt short.
Will Reckoner give me this with a shoulder restriction?
No. Shoulder and knee are both recorded against it, which is unusual for a leg movement, and it is because your arms and shoulders are what transmit the whole push into the sled.
Similar movements
Reckoner has no other movement in this swap group.
Sources
- Nosaka and Newton, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 2002. Concentric or eccentric training effect on eccentric exercise-induced muscle damage fifteen participants training one arm with lowering repetitions and the other with lifting repetitions, the lowering arm producing significantly larger losses of force and range and significantly more soreness and swelling after the first session than the lifting arm