The muscles that make up your back are arguably the most important upper body muscles. With all the desk sitting, phone texting and computer typing a lot of us do, we need to counteract that forward posture by doing lots of pulling exercises.
There are two main types of pulling exercises: vertical and horizontal.
Examples:
- Vertical Pulling Exercises: pull ups, chin ups, assisted pull ups, cable lat pulldowns, upright rows
- Horizontal Pulling Exercises: inverted rows, barbell bent over rows, dumbbell bent over rows, cable seated/standing rows, t-bar rows
It’s important to do exercises from both above categories to properly strengthen all the muscles that make up your back.
Since I show you enough pull ups on my instagram, I wanted to feature a horizontal pulling exercise for this week’s article.
TRX Inverted Row
This version is the most beginner friendly because you can vary the difficultly of this exercise easily. Walk your feet forward to make it harder, inch your feet backward (closer to standing straight up) to make it easily.
Make sure that you keep your body straight, like a plank, and notice that I don’t lose any of the “slack” or tension in the straps at the top of the movement.
Ready for a challenge? Move to the exercise below.
Inverted Row w/ Feet Elevated
Note: you could still use the TRX for this instead of rings.
For this variation you still want to keep your body very straight like a plank (make sure your hips don’t hang towards the ground) and chin tucked. You’ll also want to make sure you set up with your shoulders right below your hands.
That’s it! Let me know if you add this horizontal pulling exercise into your routine and you can thank me later when pull ups start to feel easier!