 Hey everybody, Lance Gwakie here. Today we're gonna talk about probably the most common variation of the row. I think this one is often butchered and easily butchered, so I don't really give it to that many people, unless you've trained with me for a little while or you've trained previously for a little while and you have shown competence in your movement skills. This is the bent over row, so I don't have a barbell, but you can, you know, it's the living room. You shouldn't have a barbell in your living room, right? But you can pretend I'm holding one. Basically, if you can't do a perfect RDL or a perfect RDL, then you probably don't have any business doing this exercise because you're just gonna overload your back. You're just gonna drive too much of your back. So the complexities, the challenges that we run into with the bent over row is, I've got a lot of torque on my back from gravity just holding this bar and having my hips bent over like this. I need to really stabilize this stuff. And if I have even the slightest amount of back movement over a leg movement for security, I really overload that area. And so you might still get sore in your upper back, but you're not gonna feel it so much. You're not gonna load it so much because your spinal curve starts to reverse a little too much, you stick your chest out a little too much and it doesn't allow the same loading of the upper back muscles, which is the whole reason you're doing this in the first place. So let's, I'm gonna give you a cursory overview of the RDL if you don't know what that stands for. It's Romanian deadlift. It's kind of like just a stiff legged deadlift. You need to make sure that you got that. So I've done a hundred videos on deadlifting. There's a couple about the RDL in there. Definitely look those up. Now we're here, feet are flat. And first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna kind of exhale and tuck my hips just to kind of feel a little bit more of my lower abdominals. I want to secure here so that I don't have to secure here, right? I wanna turn this on so that this can stay relaxed, okay? I'm not doing this thing. It's not a crunch. It's not a super rounded back. It's just a slight let's stack things together. So I have that and then I'm pushing my butt back until I feel a stretch in my hamstrings, which for me takes a while. So I'm pretty flexible here. So there we go, I got a little bit. Now, yes, I keep my little tuck. I find my abs, they're turning on a little bit more. I'm feeling my hamstrings a little bit more. And now from here, I'm gonna do my row. So here, theoretically we've got the bar this whole time. This is halfway down on the RDL. And then we do the same proper rowing motion that we've already learned cause we already did the three point rowing variation cause I told you to do that, right? You need to lead with the shoulder and then the elbow follows, okay? So this movement is pretty complicated, honestly. I mean, I like to simplify it this way, but to do it, it's not always as easy as the theory that we have here. So once you can kinda break it up like this, then you try to smooth it out. And I get a nice stretch at the bottom and then I get a nice retraction and squeeze at the top, okay? Just like that. And my legs are getting tired. So I'm shifting the weight onto my back. So let's find them again, there we go. And now my legs are extra tired. And it's just like this, okay? I would start with a really light weight. I would not consider like, if I'm gonna do this for the first time, I'm not gonna try to really push anything too hard. I'm gonna use this as a, let's explore this movement and see what happens kind of training session. So yeah, I got the hip tuck, I got the bend with the bar. I feel a stretch in my legs and I'm trying to make this a leg exercise. That's the goal here. So I push through my feet as I row and that helps me feel my hamstrings turn on instead of my upper back stuff. Hopefully that makes sense. Again, this one's easy to kind of butcher, easy to mess up. So ensure that you're getting the lower body muscles. Ensure that you can do the RDL first and then go into adding a rowing variation onto stuff. If you're having trouble, you know, honestly. So I had a lot of trouble with this pattern when I was going because I didn't wanna hurt my back and I wanted to keep it straight. And what I found was that I was arching my back too much and that's why my hamstrings are so flexible because that's just my pattern. That's what I like to do. Arch my back a lot, but all that does is it secures my back, but not my legs. Right, so I never feel this in the hamstrings unless I actually feel like I'm rounding over a lot more and that feels a lot better there. And that feels even better. Okay, so a little exhale, maybe a slight rounding away from where you've been holding your position could actually help you. And that's just kind of a little teaser to some videos we're gonna do later on. So this is the bent over barbell row.