reckonerT-bar row
One end of a barbell in a corner or a landmine sleeve, a handle around the other, and you row it up to your chest. It is a bent-over row on a fixed arc, which means one less thing to steer and one more thing you can load.
Flat back, pull to the chest.
- Pattern
- Horizontal pull
- Trains
- Lats, upper back, rear delts
- Kit
- Landmine, barbell
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 6 to 10 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2.5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Lower back
Muscles worked
How to do it
Anchor the bar and straddle it
Set one end in a landmine sleeve or wedge it into a corner with a plate on it. Stand over the bar with the plates in front of you and load them last, so nothing shifts while you are bent over.
Hinge and take the handle
Push the hips back, soft knees, chest down and back flat, which is the cue on your wrist. Take a close neutral handle or a wide bar depending on what your gym has, and let your arms hang straight.
Row the handle to your chest
Drive the elbows up and back until the handle touches your upper abdomen. The bar travels on an arc because it is pinned at one end, so your job is to follow it rather than steer it.
Lower until the arms are straight
Let the plates go all the way down and the shoulder blades open. Stopping the descent early keeps the set feeling productive and takes away the part of the range that lengthens the lats.
What goes wrong
Standing up as the bar comes to you
The arc invites it, because rising a few degrees shortens the pull. Fix the torso angle before rep one and judge the set by whether it survived.
Loading it like a leg press because the plates fit
The lever arm is short at the anchor end, so the plates go on faster than the difficulty rises and it is easy to end up with more on the bar than your back can row. The number of plates is not the number to chase.
Forgetting it is still a bent-over row
The chest is unsupported and the hinge is held for the whole set. Of three rows measured for spine load, the standing bent-over pattern put the most through the lower back1, and pinning one end of the bar does not change who is holding the torso up.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 45 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 45 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 45 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 45 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 45 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 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 10 at 45 kg | Load up 45 kg → 47.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 47.5 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 T-bar row better than a barbell row?
It is easier to control and easier to load, because the arc is fixed and the plates sit close to the floor. It is not a lighter bill for your lower back, which is still holding the hinge for the whole set1.
Close grip or wide grip?
Whichever handle keeps your elbows comfortable. The close neutral grip usually lets the elbows stay tighter to the ribs, and a wide overhand bar tends to pull them out and up towards the rear shoulders. Both are rows and neither is wrong.
Reckoner is not giving me this. Why?
Lower back is the restriction recorded against it. If you declared one in setup, the bent-over rows come out of your plan and the supported ones stay 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
- 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