Steps
- Hook a leather ankle cuff to a low cable pulley and then attach the cuff to your ankle.
- Face the weight stack from a distance of about two feet, grasping the steel frame for support.
- While keeping your knees and hips bent slightly and your abs tight, contract your glutes to slowly "kick" the working leg back in a semicircular arc as high as it will comfortably go as you breathe out. Tip: At full extension, squeeze your glutes for a second in order to achieve a peak contraction.
- Now slowly bring your working leg forward, resisting the pull of the cable until you reach the starting position.
- Repeat for the recommended amount of repetitions.
- Switch legs and repeat the movement for the other side.
Tracking it in OneRep
Add the one-legged cable kickback to a routine and your previous weight and reps sit beside every set, so the decision to add load is made by what is already on the screen rather than by memory. Exercise history and volume trends are one tap away, and logging works offline for the gyms where signal does not reach.
Because OneRep tracks food on the same timeline, a stall on this lift can be read against what you were actually eating that month — which is the difference between a programming problem and an eating one. More on that in tracking progressive overload without a spreadsheet.
Where the instructions come from
The steps above come from free-exercise-db, a public-domain exercise dataset. They are general guidance, not coaching for your body: if a movement hurts, stop and get someone qualified to look at it.