reckonerVest hanging knee raise
The hanging knee raise with a weight vest on. It exists because abdominal work that stays at bodyweight forever eventually stops asking for anything, and a vest is the cleanest way to keep making the same movement harder without changing what it trains.
Raise the knees, stop the swing.
- Pattern
- Core flexion
- Trains
- Abs, hip flexors
- Kit
- Bodyweight, pull up bar, weight vest
- Loading
- Bodyweight, with weight added
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 10 to 15 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 1 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Shoulder, lower back
Muscles worked
How to do it
Load the vest before you get on the bar
Fit the vest snug and high on the torso so it does not swing on you. A loose vest hanging low turns every rep into a pendulum and adds a problem the exercise did not have.
Hang and get still
Overhand grip a bit wider than the shoulders, arms straight, shoulder blades pulled down. The extra weight makes the hang itself harder, so wait longer than you would without it for the swinging to stop.
Tilt the pelvis, then raise the knees
Curl the bottom of your pelvis toward your chest first, then bring the knees up as high as that tilt allows. The vest does not change the movement, only the price of it.
Lower slowly and reset
Come down under control until you are straight and still, then pause before the next one. With load on, a swing is harder to stop once it starts.
What goes wrong
Putting the vest on too early
If the bodyweight version is already a swing, adding weight makes a heavier swing. Earn a set of still, controlled reps first and then load it.
Letting the grip decide the set
The vest adds to what your hands are holding as well as to what your trunk is lifting. If the hands are the first thing to go, straps solve it and your trunk gets the set it came for.
Jumping the load
A vest tempts big jumps because the plates come in chunks. Small increases are what let this movement keep improving, and Reckoner will give you the next one when the reps say you have earned it.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 5 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 10 at 5 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. |
| 2 | 3 x 11 at 5 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. |
| 3 | 3 x 12 at 5 kg | More reps 12 → 13 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 13 at 5 kg | More reps 13 → 14 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 14 at 5 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 14 at 5 kg | More reps 14 → 15 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. 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
Why load an abdominal exercise at all?
Because the abs respond to progressive load like the rest of you. The hanging knee-up already measures among the highest exercises for the whole of the rectus abdominis and the internal oblique1, and once you can do plenty of them the only honest way to keep the stimulus rising is to make each rep cost more.
Vest or dumbbell between the feet?
The vest, if you have one. A weight held between the feet lengthens the lever and changes the exercise, while a vest sits on your torso and leaves the movement alone. It also does not fall on the floor halfway through a set.
How much should I add?
Less than you think, and let the engine decide. Reckoner moves the reps first and the load second, so the weight only goes up when you have finished the rep range at the current one.
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
- Escamilla and colleagues, Physical Therapy, 2006. Electromyographic analysis of traditional and nontraditional abdominal exercises: implications for rehabilitation and training twenty-one healthy adults across traditional and nontraditional abdominal exercises, with the wheel roll-out, the pike, the knee-up, the hanging knee-up on straps and the inclined reverse crunch highest for upper and lower rectus abdominis, internal oblique and latissimus dorsi, and with the wheel pike and knee-up, the inclined reverse crunch and the bent-knee sit-up also highest for rectus femoris, which the authors note may be a problem for some people with low back trouble