Best Exercise You Could Ever Do: Hip IR Standing Cable Row

So yesterday I was playing around in the gym and trying out a few different body positions for some different exercises, more so to see what I felt working differently, and also to simply continually ask myself questions about what exercises would work better in certain situations than others. Take for example a client of mine who has ridiculously limited hip internal rotation range of motion bilaterally, and is developing some low back discomfort over the past few years as a result of hip immobility. Rather than simply throw mobilizing drill after mobilizing drill that only work the area passively, I wanted to get some exercises or at the very least different positions that could help promote some active internal rotation without making it an isolation movement.

Still with me so far? Hells yeah, baby. So I was using a cable machine to do a 1-arm row, and in a moment of self-awareness, I looked down to see that my feet were lined up the way they always tend to be: like I’m downhill skiing, completely parallel. I had a lightning bolt thought shoot across my mind to turn my feet into internal rotation and do the row that way. Let me tell you brothers and sisters, it did something sexy to me.

Why it Rocks So Much

By standing in internal rotation, the hip now has to stabilize in a new position it’s not used to, which means new muscles and new motor patterns firing to try to keep you upright and paying taxes. It also has the added bonus of pulling someone into an anterior pelvic tilt, which is great for someone like me who tends to gravitate towards more of a posterior tilt. It also allows you to flex your lumbar erector spinae a lot more than standing in neutral or even external rotation, which definitely plays a role in spinal stabilization.

As an added bonus, since you’re in a slight anterior tilt, lumbar extension, and thoracic extension, you can get a lot more contraction out of the lats on this one, essentially giving you more bang for your buck for what you’re trying to target. Since it’s an upper back exercise, what the hell why not just make the upper back work a little harder, especially in the lower lat fibers where a lot of people tend to be a lot weaker?? Sounds like logic to me. This was a component of rowing that I’ve been trying to figure out for quite some time now, and was never able to actually “feel” the lower lat fibers grab during a set with any other foot or hip position. After a while I felt kinda like Matt Damon trying to figure out pi with Robin Williams doing my fact-checking.

What You Need To Do

The cool thing about this exercise is that it’s almost identical to doing a normal 1-arm row, except for two small adjustments. First, turn your feet into each other until they make roughly a 90 degree angle. If you don’t have that kind of flexibility, just do what you can. When turning your feet in, make sure you do the turn from your hip instead of your foot, you’ll know you’re doing this right when you feel a stretch in the back of your hips and your knee caps turn in as well. Second, tilt your pelvis until you feel your low back muscles flexing. Put a hand on your back muscles to get some biofeedback about whether this is actually happening or not, and you’ll feel the muscles tense up pretty easily. Now hold this position while doing the row, and you’re going to get some pretty big pay-offs at the end of the day.

Another cool thing about something like this is that it can be used in pretty much any standing exercise you want (except heavy squats or deadlifts, as the chances for injury go way up with poor alignment), so play around with foot position and hip position to find new ways to torture yourselves and get some new results. Pattern burnout can be avoided by simply changing grips, angles and directions of force in order to keep seeing gains in performance, so switching something as simple as foot position and hip angle can mean an entire new exercise for you. Enjoy!!