 Hello everybody I'm Lance Coyke and today we're talking about the dumbbell row and we're talking about keeping your elbow pinned into your side while you try to do this row. So it's not always totally touching your side although sometimes it is. The reason this is suboptimal, well first, it's just different for one. I can do rows where I bring my elbow in a little bit, okay? It's not necessarily a bad thing. What makes it more difficult is that it's then harder to get the shoulder blade mechanics and I'm not going to feel the shoulder blade muscles quite as much because the torque that is put on them is less. When I swing my elbow out and the weight kind of comes out a little bit more, then I place more tension on this shoulder blade retraction rather than just bringing my elbow back, okay? So when I pin my elbow in a little closer I get more lat and I get less upper back. Conversely, if I go out to about 90 degrees, I get more middle back, upper back and less lat. Now if that's the goal, you can choose either variation. What I notice a lot of people doing is they use that pinning as a little bit of a crutch. It goes with side bending to the rowing side. When I'd rather use side bend to the support side, right? If you've watched my other videos you've heard me talk about that ad nauseam so we won't go into it. When I pin in though and I get that side bend, it's really easy for me to not bring my shoulder blade back which puts more stress on the shoulder joint itself, puts more stress on the labrum in the shoulder. If you've had slap lesions, if you've had surgical repairs, if you've got torn rotator cuffs, you probably don't want to pin your elbow in like this and you probably don't want to let it flare out either though we're not talking about that in this video. You probably want to find somewhere in between maybe about 30 to 60 degrees. I usually kind of shoot for about 45 and we're just like that, okay? Bring your elbow out and if people generally don't mess that one up, I won't go into any of the cues because you don't need them. Hopefully now you kind of have this understanding of why might I choose one exercise over another and what is it doing to me, okay? That's kind of the purpose of these videos. I want you to start to make better choices for yourself so you can make decisions that make you feel better rather than worse.