Starting Strength

straight down, but don’t try to look straight forward, either, because doing so will extend your neck too much.
    Take a big breath, raise the bar from the floor with straight elbows to get it moving, and continue bringing it up by bending your elbows and slamming the bar into the upper part of your belly. This movement leads with the elbows, and you should think about slamming your elbows into the ceiling. The most important part of the technique of the barbell row is the back position: the spine must be locked into extension, with the chest up and the lower back arched, the whole time the bar is moving. After the bar contacts your belly, lower the bar back to the floor, exhale and take a new breath, and reset your back before each rep. Don’t attempt to hold the bar against your belly at the top or lower the bar too slowly; the barbell row is like the deadlift in that the work is intended to be mainly concentric. Since heavier weights will essentially be dropped, you’ll want to use bumper plates for rowing, or use rubber mats under your standard iron plates.

    Figure 7-46. The barbell row. Each rep starts and stops on the floor.

    The row requires that the bar be started off the floor with a hip extension, not a knee extension. With light weights, you can perform rows with just your arms, but as you approach work-set weights, hip extension becomes more important. Your knees will be almost straight, just slightly unlocked, with your hips higher than they would be in a deadlift before the bar moves up – the same position used to start a stiff-legged deadlift – so that there is little chance the quads can be used. The movement starts with your arms straight and with your chest coming up, raising your back angle slightly as the bar leaves the floor – a movement performed with the hamstrings and glutes acting on the rigid back, which is held in isometric contraction by the erectors. This initial hip extension starts the weight up, and your elbows catch the momentum and carry the bar on up with a shoulder extension and scapula retraction. The lats, triceps, biceps, forearm muscles, posterior deltoids, and smaller muscles around the shoulder blades are the prime movers here. The trunk muscles that stabilize the spine enable the trunk to act as a rigid platform, against which the force can be generated. The hamstrings and glutes, after their initial action off the ground, act to anchor the pelvis, and therefore the lower back, during the final rowing motion generated by the upper body. As is so often the case in complex human movement, muscles change actions during the course of the activity, starting off with one function and ending with another, and the function of the hip extensors during the barbell row is a good example of this shift.

    Figure 7-47. Seen from above, the supine-grip barbell row has the lats working across the back where the fibers of the muscle bellies are roughly parallel to the bar.

    Rows are not useful at weights so heavy that form is hard to maintain. The finish position, when the bar touches the belly, is controlled by some of the same factors that limit a clean, in that a weight that can be rowed correctly may be only 15 pounds lighter than a weight that cannot be rowed at all. A row that is not finished will not engage the range of motion that is unique to the exercise, and thus might as well be called a “partial SLDL.” For this reason, sets of five or more reps are used, since weights that can be rowed for only a triple probably cannot be done correctly anyway. As with any ancillary exercise, it is much better to get good reps with a lighter weight for sets of 5, 8, or 10 and do several across than to lose the benefit of the exercise with a weight that is too heavy.
    The first few reps will use only a slight – maybe less than 10 degrees – amount of hip extension, but as the set progresses and the upper body becomes fatigued, more hip extension gets thrown in to get the reps finished. Be sure to continue doing rows and not deadlifts. Your back should never get much above horizontal, and if your chest comes up too high on the last reps, the bar is hitting too low, the range of motion for the target muscles has shortened, and the weight is therefore too heavy.
    As the weight gets heavy, there will be a pronounced tendency to allow your chest to drop down to meet the bar, completing the rep from the top down instead of from the bottom up. When this chest drop becomes excessive,