reckonerWeighted pull-up
The pull-up runs out of progression sooner than any other upper body lift, because its load is you and you are not getting heavier on purpose. A dip belt is how it carries on going up.
Palms away, wrists straight in the hang.
- Pattern
- Vertical pull
- Trains
- Lats, upper back, biceps
- Kit
- Bodyweight, pull up bar, dip belt
- Loading
- Bodyweight, with weight added
- 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
- Technical, worth coaching
- Recovery cost
- Very high
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Shoulder, elbow
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the belt before you leave the floor
Plates on the chain, chain hanging in front, buckle checked. Do all of it standing on the ground where a mistake costs you nothing.
Take a pronated grip a little outside your shoulders
Palms away, wrists straight rather than hooked over the bar, and hang until the plates are still. There is no reason to reach wider than this. Across three pronated widths, activation of the lats, the traps and the infraspinatus came out the same1.
Pull the elbows down and back
Chest towards the bar, shoulder blades down first, and finish with your collarbones near the bar rather than your chin over it.
Come down all the way, then step off
Straight elbows at the bottom, then step down. Half a rep with a plate on is still half a rep, and the bottom is the part that gets cut first.
What goes wrong
Cutting the bottom of the rep once it is loaded
The range quietly shortens as the weight goes up, the numbers keep climbing, and what is progressing is the shortening. Judge the load on the depth of the hang, not on the plate.
Widening the grip to make it harder
It does not do what people expect. Measured at one, one and a half and twice shoulder width, the lats worked the same at every width and the widest grip was the one lifters were weakest at1. If you want it harder, add weight.
Swinging the plates into the rep
A belt turns any wobble into a pendulum that is easy to time. Start still, finish still, and if the plates are driving the tempo the set is over.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 kg | Load up 10 kg → 12.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 12.5 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
Should I change my grip instead of adding weight?
Grip is not the variable people think it is. Seven pull-down variants differing in grip type, width and trunk angle produced no significant difference in latissimus dorsi activation2. Pick the grip your elbows and shoulders like and put the progression in the load.
What if my gym has no dip belt?
A weight vest does the same job with the load higher up, and it is in the library. Tell Reckoner what your gym actually has in setup and it prescribes the version you can run rather than the one it would prefer.
How do I know I am ready to load it?
When you can finish every set at the top of its rep range from a dead hang, without swing, on the day you feel worst that week. If that is only true on your best day, it is not true yet.
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
- Andersen and colleagues, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2014. Effects of grip width on muscle strength and activation in the lat pull-down fifteen men pulling a six repetition maximum at narrow, medium and wide pronated grips, one, one and a half and twice the distance across the shoulders, with similar latissimus, trapezius and infraspinatus activation at every width and the wide grip the one they were measurably weakest at
- 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