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Bent Over Row Round Back Retards

So I’m in the gym yesterday doing hanging clean to presses. On the drop pad next to me is a young feller doing bent over rows.  Between my sets I watched him – hey, I don’t have anything else to do.

He wasn’t using much weight, well, let me rephrase that, he wasn’t using much weight compared to what I would be doing. His legs were almost straight, he was bent at the waist, and his lower back, when viewed from the side, was as rounded as a banana. Not only that, he was using a pull from his lower back to impart the momentum to his arms to pull the weight up. It was a veritable picture of how not to do bent over rows. I was waiting for one of his discs to come pinging out of his spine like a frisbee.

Now here’s were my personal struggle came into play. It’s been my experience that most people in the gym, especially young people who already know everything there is to know about everything everwhere, don’t want to hear advice.  And it’s not like I was a lot bigger than him; we were probably close to the same size. You could tell he’d been lifting a while and wasn’t a newbie.

I struggled between keeping my mouth shut (sometimes a remarkably hard thing for me to do) and offering advice. I eventually lost to the devil on my shoulder telling me to help him out. Surprisingly, he was receptive. Whaddyaknow.

 Here’s the summary of what I told him:

• Stand over the bar like you’re getting ready to do deadlifts
• Flatten your back by rotating your hips forward
• Now without moving any other part of you body, pull the bar up to your chest with your elbows tucked and high
• Lower it back, again without moving any other part of you body, until it rests on the floor
• Repeat

And that, my friends, is how you do bent over barbell rows.

I backed up my words by easily and effortlessly performing several reps with the weight that he’d been fighting with (and losing). Gotta love that old man strength.

In the old blog section, I wrote a more complete How to do Barbell Rows post, if you’re interested and don’t already know everything about everything, everywhere.

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