Body Row

🎯 Chest🏋️ BarbellCompoundAbdominals (2°)Neck (2°)Middle back (2°)

How to do the body row

  1. Lie under a bar so that the bar is at mid chest level and your feet are firmly on the floor.
  2. Draw your abs in and keep your back flat.
  3. Using your arms, lift and row your body towards the bar.
  4. Pause for a moment and with slow controlled movements lower your self back to starting position.
  5. Repeat.

Muscles worked

The prime mover is the pectoralis major, which drives the upper arm forward and across the body.

Because more than one joint is moving, the work does not stay in one place: the abdominals brace the trunk so force can pass between the hips and the shoulders; the neck muscles keep the head from being dragged out of position; the mid-back retracts the shoulder blades so the shoulder has something solid to work from.

Every exercise for:ChestAbdominalsNeckMiddle back

How this movement works

Several joints move together, so effort spreads across a chain rather than concentrating in one place. Coordination is part of the difficulty: the movement is only as good as its weakest link, and improving it often means fixing a position somewhere other than the muscle you meant to train.

It is filed under strength: produce force against resistance for a countable number of repetitions, and progress the resistance over time.

What you need

A barbell locks both hands to one bar, so neither side can drift and the load climbs in plate-sized steps. That makes it the simplest way to add weight and the least forgiving thing to bail out of.

Every exercise using:Barbell

These train the chest too, using equipment this one does not:

Related exercises

Illustration: Everkinetic — CC BY-SA 4.0 — license. Modified versions are shared under the same license. Full attribution →

ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.