 Hey everybody, Lance Coyke here. Today, I wanna discuss these rows and why it doesn't feel right. So rowing is an upper back building exercise, but I can't tell you how many clients I have who have just said, where am I supposed to feel this? I don't really feel anything at all. I feel it a little bit up here on the top of my shoulder, but I don't really feel any muscles working. And so when I hear that, I think you are moving your arms in a very unstable position. It's kind of like you're trying to boat across the Atlantic Ocean in a rowboat that's shaky and unsteady instead of taking a cruise ship or a freighter, right? Which would be much safer, much more sturdy. So when you're not feeling those upper back muscles, we have to look more proximally, right? So there's this rule of mobility and movement and et cetera that says I need stability from the unit, to the joint, to the bone that is more toward my inside, more toward my force development center. And then I need that to, in order to get the mobility from something that's a little bit more away from the midline. So we say proximal stability before distal mobility. Now what that means in terms of rowing is my shoulder blades are more distal, more distal to my spine, yes. I'm trying not to use science terms, but I'm just gonna just use them. So the scapula are outside the spine, the spine is more inside, the spine is proximal. So I need to stabilize the spine if I'm gonna get the shoulder blades to move a little bit more. Now I can get the rowing motion by losing the spine position and I'm exaggerating it here. You see my sternum stick way out, that's not ideal. I don't want to overemphasize this thoracic extension that you may have seen on a blog or something. Yes, there is something important to that, but if I'm not feeling those muscles when I'm rowing, there is a chance, I mean, there's a chance that you don't have enough of it and you need to stick your test out a little bit more, but there's also a chance that you're doing it too much. And that's to me, that's more common. That's what I see more often because when I tell people to stabilize here, then they start to figure it out. Then they start to feel some of those muscles. So how am I thinking about this? Well, so I'll explain this situation if you're doing your rows and you're not feeling your upper back muscles, I'm just gonna say, when I'm developing force, like that in a row, I need to keep that force on the muscle that I want to work if I'm going to stress that muscle, right? And so there's a couple different ways I can develop force. I can just push my joints together or I can set my joints, I can get that proximal stability, that core stability, and then I can move distally. I can get those shoulder blades to come back and that keeps the tension on the upper back muscles, the trapezius, the rhomboids, et cetera. I guess that's really just all of them, the upper back muscles, the trapezius, rhomboids. Sorry, I'm a little sick. And so when I do that, I can keep the stress on those muscles instead of losing that anchor point and just pushing my spine forward. So I need the spine to be an anchor here. So when I'm thinking about my rows, I'm thinking, let's not let my chest stick out more. Let's keep my sternum bone or my microphone back a little bit further while I row. And then that keeps those muscles from pushing my sternum forward even more, my chest bone there. Hopefully that makes sense. I know it's long winded. Let's do another recap because I feel like I was a little too wordy there. So if I'm not feeling my upper back muscles, that means I'm losing the force on those muscles. How am I doing that? I'm losing my proximal stability. I'm letting my chest stick out too far. So when I do my row, I just need to keep the chest back a little bit. And then my center of mass stays set and I can shift the force to my upper back muscles. Hopefully that makes a little bit more sense. If you have any more questions, feel free to leave a comment below. And if it helps, if you know someone who's having some issues with this, maybe hit the notification bell and you'll get some notifications and send it to them.