Set your hips high and pack your lats to lock your spine before the pull. Pull toward your waist for maximum lat activation, or toward your sternum to hit your mid-back more. Grip just outside shoulder width and keep your elbows at the right angle for the variation you choose.
The perfect setup for a barbell bent-over row and what to do if you're unable to achieve the right position. So the position on a barbell bent-over row is the high hips, and it is a depression of the lats. So as the lats depress— the lats are a rotator, they rotate the spine. Okay, so when we depress the lats down, we're preventing rotation of the spine, which is great. The other thing here is we need to extend and keep that lower back, the lumbar spine, We need to create stiffness in here. So before we grab anything, we want to make sure this is depressed and packed. And this is where we're creating some T-extension, some thoracic extension. So this lower back kind of has that fishing hook. So imagine if a fishing rod gets a fish, the lower part of the fishing rod stays stable, but the top half bends, which is the thoracic spine. Now, some other considerations we want to have is for our feet. We don't want to have our feet too wide because we're going to be hitting our hands, which isn't going to work. So hand position, generally I like a just outside of shoulder-width grip. You can go wider, it just depends on what you're wanting to enhance on the row. So if we row straight up in a vector line, we're going to be hitting more mid-back. If we row on a diagonal axis, we're going to— and lower to our hips— we're going to be hitting more of the lats. What I get you to do is really row that into your waistline. Let's really make it a lat row, right into the waistline. That's perfect. So you can see here, that's enhancing the lats. Now as you do it, I want you to now just row it into your sternum. And you'll see here, when he rows into his sternum, It's going to be using a lot more mid-back and flare those elbows if you need to.
