After writing about the rope upright row the other week, I realised that it is incredibly hard to find anything on the web to explain how to do it. So here’s an explanation for the mysterious exercise.
The rope upright row is a variant on the upright row, I picked it up from a Charles Poliquin article on Testosterone Nation. It helps to avoid injuries in the wrists and shoulders that can occur from the original upright row exercise. It’s also simple to perform and flows much more smoothly than any other upright row variation I’ve tried. I swear by it.
How to do the rope upright row
- Attach the middle of a rope or sling to your chosen weight. I do this by threading a sling through the plates, clipping it together with a snaplock carabiner and threading a second sling through the carabiner to act as the “handles”.
- Hold the loose ends of the rope and let the weight hang down in front of you.
- Concentrate on pulling your shoulder blades down towards the floor and keeping the tops of your arms and shoulders in a neutral position. Try to minimise, or even eliminate, any internal rotation of the shoulders.
- Lock out your abs really tightly and maintaining a straight back lift the weight up until your forearms and upper arms are parallel with the floor (fists are usually level with the collarbone – you don’t need to bring your fists up to your nose), pulling your hands away from the central position as much as you need to but ensuring that you keep your shoulder blades locked down at all times. If they drift out and you start to internally rotate on a rep, then stop that set.
Here’s a video of it, from the front.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YS6gECW6Bk
Why the rope upright row is a good exercise
When using a bar, the hands are forced to stay at the angle of the bar and have to remain the same distance apart throughout the exercise. This means that the wrists end up contorting and the shoulders are pulled forward, ultimately exercising in an internally rotated position. This is a bad thing.
By replacing the bar with two ends of a piece of rope, you can maintain a neutral grip throughout the upright row, eliminating the problem for the wrists and also enabling you to keep your shoulders locked down in the correct position.
Here’s a quick video showing the side view – as you can see, I’m keeping my shoulders back throughout. Quick note though that you really need to keep your abs locked out whilst you do this. You can see that I’ve still got some work to do on my core and lumbar region – I’ll explain more about how to address this issue in a later post.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktpbDsflvL0
A simple but much more shoulder-friendly variant on an exercise many people have trouble with. What do you think?
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