reckonerStraight-arm pull-down
Arms nearly straight, sweep the bar from overhead down to the front of your thighs. It is the one pull in the library where the elbow does not bend, so the biceps cannot take over and the lats do the shoulder extension on their own1.
Arms nearly straight, sweep to the thighs.
- Pattern
- Vertical pull
- Trains
- Lats
- Kit
- Cable
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 8 to 12 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2.5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Shoulder
Muscles worked
How to do it
Stand back from the stack, not under it
Set the pulley high, take a straight bar or a rope, and walk back until the cable is already loaded with your arms overhead. Standing underneath it removes the first third of the movement.
Hinge slightly and set the back
Soft knees, a small lean forward from the hips, chest proud and ribs down. Fix that position now, because the whole rep happens with your torso still.
Sweep the bar to your thighs with long arms
Elbows almost straight, a fixed small bend that never changes. Draw an arc from overhead to the front of your legs and squeeze there for a beat.
Let it travel all the way back up
Control the return until your arms are overhead and you feel the lats lengthen. That stretched end is the part of the range this movement exists to load.
What goes wrong
Bending the elbows to move more weight
The moment the elbow starts flexing this becomes a bad pull-down and the triceps and biceps take the difference. The bend is fixed at the start and does not change all set.
Loading it like a compound pull
It is one joint moving one muscle group over a long lever, and the weight that lets you do it properly is much lighter than the pull-down beside it. Any load you have to lean into is too much.
Rocking the torso to start the arc
A small dip and drive from the hips gets the bar moving and the lat never gets the hardest part of the rep. Feet planted, hips still, arms do the travel.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 25 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 | 3 x 8 at 25 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. |
| 2 | 3 x 9 at 25 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. |
| 3 | 3 x 10 at 25 kg | More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 11 at 25 kg | More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 12 at 25 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 12 at 25 kg | Load up 25 kg → 27.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 27.5 kg and reps reset to eight. The lighter week is over, so this is back to three 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 I feel this?
Along the sides of your back and into the armpit, and often a little in the long head of the triceps, which crosses the shoulder as well as the elbow. Feeling it in the front of the shoulder usually means you have drifted under the stack.
Is this the same thing as a dumbbell pullover?
Same idea, different resistance. A cable keeps tension on the whole arc, and a dumbbell loses most of it once your arms pass vertical. Only the cable version is in the library.
Why does Reckoner take this out if I declare a shoulder problem?
Shoulder is the one restriction recorded against it. The arms spend the top of every rep fully overhead with a load on them, which is exactly the position most people with an irritable shoulder do worst in.
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