 Hello everybody, today we are troubleshooting the dumbbell row, one of my favorite variations of rowing. Today I want to talk about head sagging. So we talk about the core being a functional piece of equipment that our bodies have. But I think it's really misunderstood just how vast the core actually spans. It's not just your ab muscles. It's not just your low back muscles or your multifidae, if you've heard words like that. It's everything in the middle of your body, including your head and neck, right? If I don't have a good head and neck position, I can't achieve the right positions in my hips. If you just do a little exercise right now and you tilt your head back as far as you can, you'll notice that the rest of your body bends as well. That's just our innate mechanism for keeping our balance. Now if I let my head just flop around during my rows, I'm not only not going to get the spine position and the core stability that I need, I'm also just messing up all the nerves that come out of your neck and go down into your arm and supply your arm with the force of rowing. So if your head is sagging, it's generally going to look like this, right? I've got my hand on a stool today or on a bench maybe normally, and I'm letting my head come down like this and then I row, okay? Now here, this is a very pectoral dominant support, right? It's almost like I'm packing my shoulder blades like a bench press. I don't want to do that because I can't recruit the core muscles that I need and therefore I cannot recruit the upper back muscles that I'm targeting during my row. I can probably do more weight this way with my head sagging down, but not with the right technique, right? Not at, you know, at what cost are we doing this? So if I'm sagging like this, big first step is you just got to try to push your neck towards the ceiling, okay? And that's a really good start. I want to make sure that I've got pressure on my heels and I'm not just arching my back up to get my neck because then I'm not getting the position that I need, right? I'm just throwing myself into that arch pattern that we mentioned earlier that I don't want. So if I'm sitting here, I push myself away just like this and now what you're going to notice. If you're the one doing this head sagging kind of thing is after you're going to cue it, you're going to reach up and it's not going to be enough and then you're going to have to go again and push even harder than you did or even further than you did and then there we go. Now I've got a nice kinder round upper back, not too round, not too arched, but, you know, Goldilocks right there in the middle. So if you're doing it wrong, do it twice to make sure you get in a better spot. And then after that, once you do a couple of rows, you're probably just going to fall back into what you know how to do. You're probably just going to let your head sag down again. So you're going to need to stop. I usually say two reps, though, usually it only takes one for somebody to mess it up. I like to give you a little bit of a benefit of the doubt, right? I like to give you some practice with it. So every two reps, I want you to stop and then reset again and you're going to do your row and then you're going to mess it up and then you're going to stop and you're going to reset again. Now eventually, you want to get to the point where you don't have to do that. You don't have to stop every two reps to cue yourself, but until it's become automatic, you're not going to know if you're doing it or not. So you're going to need to continuously learn this new way of supporting yourself, this new way of core stability during your row.