Introduction:

No matter the variation, rows tend to be a difficult exercise for patients to perform and coaches to teach. One reason for this struggle is the lack of visual feedback. For example, when performing exercises for your legs, chest, or biceps you receive constant visual feedback related to your technique and range of motion. However, this is non-existent with a row due to its posterior location. The second problem for rowing exercises is the shoulder. Although it's the number two cause, it becomes the number one culprit of compensation by becoming the primary mover and creating false ranges of motion. In this article, you will learn how to coach a perfect row by learning the following strategies.

• Teach Scapular Protraction & Retraction
• Synch It All Up!
• Slight Shoulder Abduction

If you're more of a visual learner, simply watch the same concepts in the video below:

Teach Scapular Protraction & Retraction

As previously mentioned, the majority of the confusion during a row comes from the non-existent visual feedback. As a result, we see the humerus move into an over-extended motion that places the shoulder in a vulnerable position. Furthermore, this creates a disconnect and skepticism as to where the patient/client is supposed to correctly feel the movement.

 To ensure that the patient/client feels their scapular muscles during a row, we first need to dissociate and teach proper protraction and retraction mechanics. To teach this, we can use a simple analogy and four simple cues to help them understand the foreign technique.

1. Reach your arm straight out in front of you at 90 degrees of shoulder flexion
2. Imagine you have a tube that is running from your wrist to your shoulder
3. The tube does not allow you to bend your elbow
4. Show me how you would pull your arm out of the tube

That's it!

This should achieve the desired scapular protraction and retraction that you're looking for without adding confusing anatomical language and avoiding vulnerable positions at the shoulder.

Synch It All Up!

Now that you understand how to better coach scapular protraction and retraction — we need to synch it up! If we breakdown the biomechanics of a row then we can describe them as elbow flexion, humeral extension, and scapular retraction. To get them moving together, think of the scapula starting early while the elbow and humerus have a delayed start. 

The ideal ending position is when these three movements stop together and the arm is at the side of the body in line with the ribs. However, when this fails to occur, we see the elbow end past the ribs. The common compensation happens for two reasons.

1. The three continuous motions failed to stop together — the scapula stopped with the humerus continued to extend.
2. Lack of awareness — the brain feels continued motion so it believes that it's scapular retraction while it's actually compensatory humeral extension

As a result of these two problems, we see the unwanted "hard" end feel. This is when the humeral head rolls forward and exposes itself to unwanted forces at the glenohumeral joint. Conversely, we should always be striving to observe a "soft" end feel. This occurs when proper scapular retraction takes place which doesn't move the humeral head excessively forward.

Slight Shoulder Abduction

The final strategy to coach a perfect row is to maintain a slight amount of shoulder abduction. When this is followed there will be two primary benefits.

1.  More space at the Glenohumeral Joint — the slightly abducted position places the shoulder to be more in the scapular plane which opens the joint up the joint space more compared to when the arm is closer to the body
2. Avoids internal rotation compensation — the abduction is going to help maintain humeral external rotation bias that is needed during a row based on its coupled motions and increased space. When the arm is too close to the side it increases the chances that internal rotation will occur.

We can cue this desired position by placing your arm between the patients/client rib cage and arm. From here, simply cue them to "not touch your arm" as they move through their rowing range. This will provide them the necessary feedback to maintain their proper form without excessive thought or confusion.

Conclusion

And there you have it! Three simple, yet powerful strategies to coach a perfect row. The next time you are coaching a row to a patient or client, make sure that you are first starting with scapular protraction/retraction mechanics, then teaching how to synch it all up, and finally making sure that they're maintaining their proper position with a slight amount of shoulder abduction. If you can follow these steps and the patient/client understands it, you will take your back exercises to the next level! If you're interested in diving deep into topics like this, I encourage you to check out the Performance Redefined Course where we go into much more detail.