welcome back guys we are here in the middle of back day and i want to share with you guys one of my favorite variations on the cable row to make sure you're hitting your lower latch fibers effectively [Music] so one of the questions i get when it comes to training any body parts is can you actually isolate different segments or regions of the muscle such as the lower lats or maybe the upper inner pec or the outer quad sweep i think it's a very important distinction to make because the reality is you can't individually isolate
all of these different sections of the body you're going to train your lats you're going to train your upper chest you're going to train your quads not just the outer quad but at the same time it's also very very important to be thinking about the exercises you choose how you set them up and the technique that you perform that exercise with to make sure that you're setting your body up in a way that aligns all the different muscle fibers in that body part as optimally as possible so they can contribute to the movement as easily
as possible now to make it a little bit less wordy a little bit less geeky make a little bit more relatable for you guys we're going to look at a couple of different variations of the cable row before we get to one of my favorites which is this here the high seated cable row we're going to start back on the typical low cable row to help show you guys where some of the low lat fibers may not be in the best position to be contracting contributing to the row motion so there's nothing wrong whatsoever with
doing a seated cable room that you'll see in most gyms this would be grabbing onto the bar handles or whatever you're grabbing onto whatever implements it might be sitting up straight and pulling it back maybe you do a little bit of a rock maybe you don't do whatever you're meant to be doing whenever you feel like doing on the exercise so this is how you would do mostly typical horizontal rows we call this a horizontal rope because you're pulling directly in this horizontal axis where this would be vertical and that is where the first i
guess mismatch may be occurring when it comes to effectively training your entire lat musculature because if you're looking at the lats the lat fibers don't just run in this horizontal axis they don't just run in the vertical axis either they run in this fan shape that sort of wraps around your entire rib cage from the base of your spine around your pelvis all the way up up through your army around your armpit into the inside of your arm so because of that we usually need to do more than one exercise maybe but we should just
be thinking about those exercises that we choose to do are we setting them up in the ideal position for the muscles to be contracted so again with the seated cable row as we're pulling in horizontally we're going to get a lot of motion and we're going to get a very direct line of pull for more of these mid to upper fibers around the thoracic region and we're not going to get as much of a direct line of pull for the lower lat fibers and fan all the way down towards the pelvis so in order to
do that we're going to come over to the high seated cable room so over here this is one of my favorite pieces of equipment unfortunately it's a piece of equipment that is very very hard to find in a lot of gyms out of all the gyms i've been to all over the world i've only seen this in maybe three or four gyms not even including my own space right here but it's part of why i made sure i got one of these for my gym so you'll see obviously instead of having the cable coming down
in front of you here in this horizontal line the cable is coming out from above my head on roughly this 45 degree line and what you're going to see when i go through the actual motion of pulling is that this cable is going to line up very nicely with my entire lat musculature and in particular those lower fibers that run that diagonal axis down towards my pelvis so setup is fit in a similar kind of position grabbing onto the handles and instead and you'll be pulling in this downward trajectory down towards your chest or down
towards your rib cage as we go through the motion here all the same kind of cues would apply that you would do in a typical cable row but it's the direction of that line of resistance is the direction of the cable that more closely aligns with my lower lat fibers and honestly all of the lat fibers so if we're doing a cable row as an exercise if we choose to do it with a high setup versus a low setup you could argue that you're going to get a lot more stimulation out of the high cable
setup final question is what do i do if i don't have this machine in my gym because you just said there's only four ish gyms in the world you've come across that have this machine well if you don't have the machine i'm going to show you guys now how we can settle up using other implements all right so if you don't have one of those high cable row setups you're taking settle up in your typical adjustable pulley adjustable cable station so we're here in a cable crossover you might have one of those different functional trainers
in the gym you might have one of those single station adjustable pulleys it's all the same all you want to be thinking about is setting up the cable at a height that allows you to when you're sitting down on a bench or sitting down on the floor it allows you to align that cable on that diagonal line of pull which should line up closely with your lat fibers it shouldn't take you too much better work that out either get your phone out take a little video of yourself or do it next to maybe a mirror
if you can and all you're looking for is does that cable pull through my forearm and does that forearm line up diagonally with those lat fibers so i'm here the cable is set up roughly at about my shoulder-ish height i'm sitting down on the ground you need your feet anchored against something otherwise you're gonna fly right back up and all we're gonna do is the exact same thing body position quite straight pulling straight down towards the chest getting a stretch pulling down and you'll see it's the exact same position i was in on the high
cable room the only thing is that depending on the cable setup you're using you might struggle to find enough weight on these single adjustable cable stations so you'll see here oh you know what i should have put this on the youtube i'm going to put on the full stack so you guys think i'm really really strong when in actual fact it's just that these cable stations are quite light because of how they're engineered um but you didn't see that full stack really strong eugene yeah gains pulling down um but yeah some of these different adjustable
pulley stations they're designed in a way where the load here this 91 kilos or 200 pounds it's not traveling a very far distance so it's not providing a lot of resistance so you might find it hard to actually have enough load on the bar to really tax your muscles however if you do enough reps if you keep your respirators short enough you will still be able to stimulate your lats as much as possible and what we're going for here is setting your body up into that ideal position so give that a shot let me know
what you guys think i hope you guys enjoyed this little exercise tutorial if you did give it a thumbs up don't forget to subscribe to the channel and i'll see you guys next time
