 Hey everybody Lance Goyki here today. I want to discuss the upper traps in the horizontal rowing variations so When I when I take my arms back like this oftentimes one of the biggest mistakes people make is they shrug their shoulders up towards their ears Now I have to I have to ask these people silently to myself when I'm training them can they even resist the urge to do that and I want to leave that as a little teaser we might get into that later on Basically when I'm doing my row I want these upper back muscles the rhomboids Which we talked about previously and the trapezius muscles to pull the shoulder blades back together now We generally break the trapezius this big diamond muscle in your upper back into three sections One is these upper sections which also pull the shoulder blades up The middle sections more are more oriented toward bringing them together and then the lower sections Tilt them upward and bring them downward So all of those can be very important for different exercises. I still want to involve the upper trap Slightly when I'm doing my retractions it connects to the Clavicle muscle here or the clavicle bone here and it helps me pull those back But if I get too much recruitment of that, I'm gonna start seeing those shoulders right up I'm gonna see extra tension in the neck and I'm not gonna have the Best position for the shoulder to be rowing in right now more likely to feel shoulder pain while I'm doing rows and stuff Okay, and and you know, maybe not even during the row, but maybe during the rest of your life So we want to look at that right? We don't want to let the shoulders ride up too much And so the basic cue is hey just set your shoulders down Go really slowly try to feel it out and I want you to get your row And I want you to try to get a little squeeze at the end and if you feel it in your middle back or your upper back Then that's good to thumbs up and if you start to feel it in your neck Then okay, you're that's probably telling you that you're shrugging your shoulders up a little too much And you should either back off the row not try to force too much because maybe you're running out of motion and your shoulders are shrugging up to get that extra motion or that extra squeeze or Maybe you just need to stabilize some stuff now The teaser so sometimes You can't get your full range of motion and it feels like you're not doing anything and that's because The rib cage is so wide that the shoulder blades Can't swing around very well They it the the rib cage should be kind of circular It's more of an olba kind of circular and what happens is it starts to look more like a sandwich and So I can't get all of this motion I can't get that full squeeze in the back because nothing is Stabilizing it because it's so thin like this if I have this rounded position Then my round shoulder blades have some sort of stability some place to sit While I do my rowing stuff Okay, and so maybe I'm trying to get that squeeze, but I'm running out of room because my back is so flat and I'm starting to elevate my shoulders just as a Substitution just to try to because I'm a task oriented human being just to try to do what my trainer is asking me to do Okay, so might not totally be your fault You might not have the ability to do it So you may need to look into changing the position the orientation of this rib cage You may need to make it a little bit more round, right? I may not want to sit up straight all the time because maybe that's Making the problem worse and instead maybe I need to learn the appropriate times and the appropriate amount of slouching to have during my Lunges is a big one during my push-ups, especially and during something maybe a little bit more simple like a plank Okay, so try those three exercises out if you're having those issues Basically to recap the upper trap is Not often that desire I need a little bit of it, but I shouldn't be feeling it during the row If I am I might be forcing too much motion or I might just not have that motion available to me, so Try to cue the shoulders down during your row if it's not helping you feel those middle back muscles Then maybe start to look into other exercises to help reposition your rib cage like the push-up the plank and even some lunging variations with an appropriate Amount of slouching made a ton of videos a hundred about pushing and handstands and stuff and then a hundred about squats and stuff And there's some unilateral stuff in there. So go look through those and Master those exercises and then maybe come back and try the row again later