How To Do Bent Over Rows Properly

The bent over row is an excellent exercise for developing your upper body. This exercise will mainly target the lat and mid-back muscle groups.

As you get started with your workout program, you’ll definitely want to make sure that you’re including the bent over rows exercise in the mix. Bent over rows are a terrific upper body strengthening movement and will help to work multiple muscles all at once.

For this reason, they can help to cut back on the total time that you spend doing your workout and help you burn more calories per minute during that session.

Let’s have a look at the information you need to know about bent over rows.

What Are Bent Over Rows?

First things first, you need to learn what bent over rows are. Bent over rows are an upper body movement that is going to have you pulling a barbell or set of dumbbells directly into the body.

Bent over rows are traditionally added towards the start of a workout program as they are a compound movement and will require a higher amount of energy to complete them.

The Muscles Worked When Performing Bent Over Rows

When looking at the main muscles that you’ll work when doing bent over rows, you’ll be hitting the lat muscles, the mid-back muscles (traps and rhomboids), as well as the biceps and posterior head of the deltoids.

If you pair bent over rows with a chest press movement, you’ll really be working just about every single muscle in the upper body, so can create a fast yet highly effective workout.

How To Perform Bent Over Rows Correctly

So how do you perform bent over rows correctly?

To begin the exercise you want to place a barbell or a set of dumbbells down by your feet.

Once there, adopt a stance so that the feet are slightly wider than hip width apart and bend over at the waist, making sure to keep the spinal column in a neutral position.

The head should be looking just forward towards the ground, not straight in front of you or this will place too much strain on the neck and all the tendons and ligaments surrounding it.

Once you’re in that position, you’ll reach downward to grasp the barbell or set of dumbbells and then immediately begin to pull the weight upwards into the center of the body. You’ll want to think of pulling it right into the lower chest region for the greatest back muscle activation.

When doing so, you’ll also want to make sure to think about using the muscles between the shoulder blades to execute the movement.

One big mistake that some people make is using momentum to drive the lift or they’ll use primarily the biceps to hoist the weight.

While it’s a great way to work the bicep muscles, if you want maximum benefits from bent over rows, you want to be working the muscles that they are specifically designed to target.

So there you have the vital information on how to perform bent over rows correctly. If you can add three to four sets of these in your workout program, you should be seeing noticeable improvements in your strength level quickly.

How to Correctly Perform Bent Over Rows

This video shows the correct posture to perform bent over rows without injuring yourself.