Row Exercise Tips
Weight Training Advice
size of your upper back you need to build width and thickness. While many weight trainers focus more on increasing the width of their upper backs, it's very important to work on building thickness in those muscles as well. Row exercises are the best for increasing thickness in the upper back.
There are many different ways to do rows. You can do them with free weights, cables, or machines. All of them offer you a lot of variety with grip ranges and how you perform the exercises.
Doing your row exercises with free weights will probably help you build upper back thickness quicker than using machines. With free weights, you won't be forced to lift in a fixed plane and you'll use many small muscles to help stabilize the weight.
The most popular way to do free weight rows is to bend forward at the waist and pull a barbell to your abdomen with an overhand grip. You'll want to arch your lower back more than bend it and keep your upper body at around a 45 degree angle to the floor rather than parellel to it. At the top of a bent over row rep you'll want to squeeze the upper back muscles hard. One great way to build lat thickness is to do bent rows with an underhand grip.
Dumbbell rows done one arm at a time are another great exercise for increasing the thickness of your upper back. Do these with the side you aren't lifting on supported by a bench and pull the dumbbell up from the floor to your side.
One great, yet underused, row exercise is the t-bar row. To do this exercise you load weights onto one end of a barbell without putting any weight on the other end. You then bend over, grip the barbell with both hands close to the weight end, and pull the weight up to your midsection.
Cable rows are also great for building your upper back. They'll allow you to get constant resistence throughout a rep and you can use different grips on them.
While you may not want to do too many machine row exercises unless you have problems with certain injuries, they do make great finishers to an upper back workout.
To continually make size and strength gains from your rowing exercises you should make sure to change up your grip ranges. If you always do them the same way you'll be more likely to hit a plateau. With most row exercises you can change how close or made you grip the barbell, dumbbell or other rowing apparatus. You can also use an overhand, underhand, or palms facing grip for more variety.
If you are weight training to build muscle size, you'll want to gain mass in your upper back. A well developed upper back will help give your physique a very powerful appearance. To increase the overall
