reckonerVest pull-up
A vest is the finest increment a pull-up has. It sits against your chest instead of swinging from your hips, which makes it the version to reach for when a belt turns every set into a pendulum.
Palms away, wrists straight in the hang.
- Pattern
- Vertical pull
- Trains
- Lats, upper back, biceps
- Kit
- Bodyweight, pull up bar, weight vest
- Loading
- Bodyweight, with weight added
- Reckoner prescribes
- 4 sets of 6 to 10 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 1 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Technical, worth coaching
- Recovery cost
- Very high
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Shoulder, elbow
Muscles worked
How to do it
Load the vest evenly, front and back
Most vests take small bars in pockets on both sides. Fill them symmetrically and tighten the straps until nothing shifts when you jump. A vest that slides is a vest you will fight rather than carry.
Take a pronated grip and hang
Palms away, hands a little wider than your shoulders, wrists straight. Let the shoulders rise, then set the blades down and back before anything else moves.
Pull the elbows to your ribs
Chest up towards the bar, elbows driving down and back. The vest keeps the load close to your center, so the pull should feel like the unloaded one, only heavier.
Lower until the arms are straight
Control the whole way down and let the shoulder blades rise at the bottom. The lowering half is where a vest earns its keep, because there is nothing swinging to help you cheat it.
What goes wrong
Filling it as heavy as it will go on day one
A vest steps in small amounts on purpose. That is the point of it, and going straight to a big load throws away the one advantage it has over a belt.
Wearing it loose
A slack vest rides up under your armpits at the top of the rep and lands on your ribs at the bottom. Strap it down before the first set, not after the third.
Assuming it is easier than a belt at the same weight
It is not lighter. The load sits higher and closer to the bar, which changes how it feels rather than how much it is, and it keeps your midsection working to stop it from swaying.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 8 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 8 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 8 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 8 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 8 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 8 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 8 kg | Load up 8 kg → 9 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 1 kg to 9 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
Why use a vest instead of a dip belt?
Two reasons. It steps in much smaller amounts, and it does not hang and swing, so a set stays still. A belt is better once the load is heavy enough that a vest cannot hold it.
Is a vest pull-up worth doing if I can already do many bodyweight reps?
Yes, and it is usually the better move. More weekly sets keep buying more size and strength with shrinking returns1, so at some point adding load beats adding another set of twenty.
Does the vest change the grip advice?
No. Grip width and forearm orientation did not change latissimus dorsi activation across seven pull-down variants2, so take the grip that suits your shoulders and let the vest carry the progression.
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. Four of the five have pages so far.
Sources
- Pelland and colleagues, Sports Medicine, 2025. The resistance training dose response: meta-regressions exploring the effects of weekly volume and frequency on muscle hypertrophy and strength gains sixty-seven studies and 2058 participants, with size and strength both rising as weekly set volume rises and both showing diminishing returns, and weekly frequency compatible with a negligible effect on size once volume is accounted for
- Buonsenso and colleagues, Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology, 2025. Electromyographic analysis of back muscle activation during lat pulldown exercise: effects of grip variations and forearm orientation forty men with at least five years of training pulling seven pull-down variants at seventy per cent of their repetition maximum, with no significant difference in latissimus dorsi activation across any of them, and the only significant finding a rise in posterior deltoid activity with a wide pronated grip and a thirty degree trunk lean