Bodyweight Hip Rows

At about hip height. Ring height is what decides where you can pull to, so it is not an adjustable detail here. Set them much higher and you can no longer reach your hip, which turns the exercise back into a normal chest row. Set them much lower and you run out of floor clearance at the bottom. Ignore the usual advice about lowering the rings to make a row harder, because on this version foot position is the dial, not ring height. The one thing worth checking every session is that both straps are the same length, since a ring pair that is even slightly uneven loads one lat harder on every rep.

They are two different exercises and both are worth training. Pulling to the chest with wider elbows works the rear deltoid, mid back and the small muscles around the shoulder blade, because the shoulder is driving the upper arm out and back away from your sides. Pulling to the hip with the elbows at roughly 45 degrees drives the shoulder into extension, and that is where the lats and teres major actually have leverage. If you want more lat, a stronger pull up and a route into front lever rows, the hip target is the one to spend time on. It does not replace the chest version, it sits next to it.

Usually one of three things. The elbows are flaring out wide, which takes the lats out, because with the upper arm heading out to the side the shoulder is working in a direction the lats have almost no leverage in. The pull is stopping short, so the elbow never gets behind the torso and the shoulder never reaches deep extension. Or the shoulder blades never squeeze together at the top, so the arms finish the rep alone. Fix the elbow path first, roughly 45 degrees from the body and held there the whole way up. An overhand grip helps too, since it makes it easier to pull higher, which is exactly what you are after here, and it puts the biceps at a weaker angle than an underhand grip so the back does more of the work.

No. On a fixed bar the touch is a handy marker, but a ring goes wherever your hand goes, so contact on its own tells you nothing about whether you finished the pull. The real marker is the elbow travelling behind your torso with the shoulder blades squeezed together. If that has happened and you feel the squeeze in the mid back, the rep is complete whether or not anything touched. The thing actually worth watching is the opposite cheat, letting the hip rise to meet the rings, because that shortens the pull and makes a short rep feel finished.

Let the shoulder blades travel forward at the bottom, but keep the shoulder itself pulled down. At the bottom the blade should be free to slide around the ribcage so you get the full range and the lats load from a long position. What you do not want is the shoulder rolling forward and the trapezius shrugging up toward your ear, which is a different thing from the blade moving. So the sequence is shoulders down at the bottom with the blades released, then squeeze the blades together at the top. Holding them locked in retraction for the entire rep just cuts the range and turns it into an arm pull.

Spend the free progressions first. Step the feet further forward, under and then past the rings, until the body is closer to horizontal. Then slow the tempo down and add a pause with the rings at the hip, which is where most people are weakest. Then elevate the feet on a box, going up in small steps, because the flatter your body gets the more of your weight the arms carry. After that, work one side at a time with archer rows and then one arm rows. Load comes last, and a vest or a loaded backpack suits this movement better than a dip belt, because plates hanging from your waist pull the hip out of the extension the whole exercise is built on.