reckonerVest reverse lunge
A reverse lunge with a weighted vest on. The load sits on your trunk rather than in your hands, which leaves your arms free to balance and keeps the weight from swinging. For a single leg movement, where balance is usually what fails first, that is a real advantage.
Step back, drop the back knee down.
- Pattern
- Lunge
- Trains
- Quads, glutes
- Kit
- Bodyweight, 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
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Moderate
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Knee, hip
Muscles worked
How to do it
Fit the vest tight
Against your ribs, no room to shift. On a single leg movement a vest that swings is a load arriving after your foot has landed, which is exactly when you least want it.
Stand tall with your feet under your hips
Arms free at your sides. Look at a fixed point ahead of you and keep looking at it while you step.
Step straight back and drop the back knee
One clear step behind you, in line with the hip. Back knee down toward the floor, front shin close to vertical. That is the cue on your wrist.
Stand up on the front leg
Drive through the front heel, bring the back foot home. The back toe is balance. If it is pushing, the front leg is not being trained.
What goes wrong
Letting the vest shorten the rep
The back knee should reach the same place under load as it did without. A vest that costs you depth is heavier than your legs today, and the record will show a heavier lunge rather than a shorter one, which is the wrong lesson for the engine to learn.
Stepping wide to keep your balance
With extra weight up high, widening the step is the instinctive fix and it makes the rep easier without you deciding to. Keep the step in line with the hip. If you cannot, take weight out of the vest.
Assuming hands free means the same exercise
It is not the same as the dumbbell version and Reckoner records it separately for that reason. The load is in a different place, the balance demand is different, and the increments are smaller because a vest steps in smaller pieces than a dumbbell rack does.
Treating a lunge as an accessory
A loaded lunge is a serious hip exercise as well as a leg one. In a systematic review across sixteen studies, the traditional lunge cleared the very high threshold of 60 per cent of a maximal contraction for gluteus maximus activation, alongside the hip thrust and the conventional deadlift1. Put it where you are still fresh.
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
Vest or dumbbells for lunges?
The vest if balance is what limits you, because it frees your arms and stops the load swinging. Dumbbells if you want to go heavier than a vest holds. They are separate movements here with separate records, so using both costs you nothing.
How much weight should be in the vest?
As much as still lets the back knee reach the floor and the step stay in line. That test is better than any percentage, because the point of loading a lunge is a heavier lunge rather than a shorter one.
Will Reckoner give me this with a hip restriction?
No. Knee and hip are both recorded against it. Declare either in setup and it comes out of your plan.
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
- Krause Neto and colleagues, Journal of Sports Science and Medicine, 2020. Gluteus Maximus Activation during Common Strength and Hypertrophy Exercises: A Systematic Review a systematic review of sixteen studies reporting gluteus maximus activation as a share of maximal voluntary contraction, in which the step-up and its variations sat at the top of the list and the split squat, the lunge, the hip thrust variations and the conventional deadlift all cleared the review's very high threshold of 60 per cent