If You’re Not Rowing, You’re Not Building Your Back

Apologies for the minor delay on releasing this one, but it is a holiday week and I’ve been detained with holiday shit. The article to kick off 2020 will be a fucking banger however- a new Killer Workouts will be dropping on your faces within a week! Till then, Happy Festivus, Merry Christmas, Kwanzaa, Chanukah, and Chinese New Year (which I realize isn’t this time of year, but fuck it I’m being inclusive).

Since the dawn of man, the breadth, depth, and power inherent in a person’s back has been the true measure of their strength. “Can you pick that up?” was the question one person asked another to gauge strength, and the appearance of a man’s back and shoulders is how one judged the physical strength of an opponent. From every description of a bad motherfucker in the novel Shane to the the visual criteria for hiring labor for a construction job, no one in history was gauging a person’s physical prowess on the size of their arms- it’s the width and strength of a person’s back that is their measure. Practically every trashy, bodice-ripper romance novel mentions the man’s broad back as evidence of his masculinity, and even in bodybuilding the belief is that a Mr. and Ms. Olympia is built on the strength of their back.

“His chest was pure muscle, the kind that came from fighting thoroughbred horses for mastery, day after day. Even in the waning light, she could see that his shoulders were enormous, his arms rippled with muscles as he loosely held the reins. He was turned to the side, slightly away from her, so she could see how the muscles marched down his broad back.” 

– Julia Quinn, The Lady Most Likely (a book Tara ordered immediately because she’s never heard of it and loves Julia Quinn). And if you’re thinking “who gives a fuck?” consider the fact that even girliest of girls (and the polar opposite in heavy lifting, pro wreslting, former carnies) want a barn-door back on their man.

Even the strongest man in history prior to the modern age, Orm Storolfsson, built his legend on the strength of his back. The Viking version of Herecles, Storolfsson was most famous for being a wild-eyed, reckless motherfucker who managed to walk with a 1400 pound ships mast on his back before his spine broke and he died, but he was also the Rambo of the ancient world- laying waste to troll colonies, exacting revenge on people who had wronged him, and blood eagle-ing the fuck out of the person who forced his best friend to do the fatal walk (disemboweled him, tied one end of his intestines to an iron pole stuck in the ground, then made him walk in circles around the pole, while speaking the entire fucking time, to completely tear out his own fucking guts.

“Our hero, Orm Storolfson, is of the type we see in men like Grettir Ásmundarson or Egil Skallagrímsson – heroic, certainly, but deeply problematic for Icelandic society. As usual with this sort of character, Orm is preternaturally disposed to greatness, ‘big and strong from an early age and highly accomplished in skills, because by the time he was seven years old he was the equal of the mightiest men in strength and all skills.’ Fortunately, whereas Grettir was flaying horses alive in his youth and Egil was killing other boys, the worst Orm does is throw a horse and its cart on top of a pile of hay and lift the entire arrangement, in the process knocking his father off, breaking three of his ribs” (Firth).

The thing that really cemented his fame, however, was the fact that Orm the Strong had fifty men load a thirty-three foot ships mast onto his back, which he then walked three steps with before his back gave out and he died. Hafþór Björnsson broke the record in the last couple of years, but Hafthor is also a professional lifter who is nearly seven feet tall and weighs 440 pounds- the Vikings, by comparison, were on average 3-4 inches shorter than people of the modern era and far, far lighter, which makes Hafthor’s effort somewhat less impressive, since he was competing against a non-lifter half his size. It does, however, lend a lot of credence to the idea that a lot of rowing builds a shitload of strength, because rowing is what the Vikings did a hell of a lot of.

So, in spite of the fact that the evidence for the importance of a badass back is literally what our civilization is steeped in, people still neglect what they cannot see, as if the rest of the world cannot. One massive exception to this in strength sports is in CrossFit, a sport that boasts the best built backs, per capita, in the sporting world. That is because the amount of posterior-chain shit CrossFitters do is berserk, and because their workouts are heavy as shit on rowing.

That’s not to say that their row weights are particularly heavy, which is where a lot of powerlifters and Oly lifters fuck up- using high rep cable or machine rows to condition your back, build muscular endurance, and improve your muscularity is the key to a broad, thick back that looks like it’s roughly carved from granite. If you look at most “hardcore” programs, you’ll see nothing but barbell exercises, and no reps over 10, because they’re “useless,” which is about as logical as the Facebook “Epstein didn’t kill himself” back-patters who completely ignore the fact that Ghislaine Maxwell, Prince Andrew, and the CEO of Victoria’s Secret are all walking around free as fucking birds (because they’re smug, uneducated fuckwits who never took rhetoric in undergrad), when you consider both historical precedents and the manner in which elite lifters train.

So don’t be a dumbass, uneducated conspiracy theorist who gets lost in the middle of a Scooby Doo episode when the bad guy starts “tying up loose ends”- just do some fucking rows. And maybe do some research about how the criminal organizations take care of witnesses- they don’t kill one and leave a half dozen alive to rat on everyone. They kill anyone they think might know anything at all. And do a shitload of rows while you’re doing that, because all of us need to do a fuckload more rowing.

Here’s why:

The Historical Precedents are Legion

Clearly, no one was doing cable rows back in the day- they were rowing ships. It’s no surprise then that the barbarians considered to be the biggest and strongest were also the most skilled in sea faring. The Sea Peoples, who attacked the ancient Near East like the Vikings did in Europe a thousand years later, were a nearly unstoppable force of mohawked raiders who terrorized the Egyptians, Hittites, and Canaanites. They always attacked from the sea in waves, inexorable as cancer and as unstoppable as herpes. They were consistently outnumbered by the Egyptian forces, yet they’re such hard motherfuckers they appear to have fought unarmored and managed to terrorize the Near East for a couple hundred years with little more than a sword and the strength built by a lifetime of rowing.

Later seafaring tribes like the Gauls, Vandals, and Vikings were all known for their size, strength, and insane fighting prowess, and even the savage Picts of Scotland are believed to have been a seafaring people related to the Basques who traveled to the British Isles by boat to await the eventual arrival of the Roman legions, whom they then slaughtered wholesale while rocking sick mohawks, a shitload of blue paint, and bearing the strength of generations of oarsmen distilled into a single hateful, bloodthirsty genetic line.

The common thread among all of these people from a physical perspective was one feature:

Rowing. Like a motherfucker.

“The Gauls are tall, with rippling muscles, and white of skin, and their hair is blond, and not only naturally so, but they also make it their practice by artificial means to increase the distinguishing colour which nature has given it” (Diodorus Siculus). “Their savage eyes make them fearful objects; they are eager to quarrel and excessively truculent. When, in the course of a dispute, any of them calls in his wife, a creature with gleaming eyes much stronger than her husband, they are more than a match for a whole group of foreigners; especially when the woman, with swollen neck and gnashing teeth, swings her great white arms and begins to deliver a rain of punches mixed with kicks, like missiles launched by the twisted strings of a catapult…. They are fit for service in war at any age; old men embark upon a campaign with as much spirit as those in their prime; their limbs are hardened by the cold and incessant toil, and there is no danger they are not ready to defy” (Ammianus Marcellinus).

“Fit for service at any age,” because their bodies were conditioned as hell to violent outbursts of raw power. With backs strong enough to support a shield wall, carry a ship’s mast, or to rip stones out of the ground to build a new monument to Lugh, these motherfuckers were ready due entirely to a lifetime of heavy, violent rowing, and the ontogenetic adaptations of the generations of rowers before them.

Hell- the ability to row well was so inimical to the concept of a strong person that the Egyptians even made it a point to attribute legendary rowing skills to their gods.

“The spiritual importance of boats explains, for example, the unlikely rowing abilities attributed to Amenhotep II, the Pharaoh who ruled Egypt c.1427-1401 BC. An inscribed limestone slab records that Amenhotep was extraordinarily strong and a great sportsman, supreme at horse-riding, archery and rowing: Strong of arms, untiring when he took the oar, he rowed at the stern of his boat as the stroke-oar for two hundred men. Pausing after they had rowed half a mile, they were weak, limp in body, and breathless, while his majesty was strong under his oar of twenty cubits (nine metres/thirty feet) in length. He stopped and landed his boat only after he had done three miles of rowing without interrupting his stroke. Faces shone as they saw him do this. Amenhotep’s sporting skills were exaggerated not just to feed his Trumpian ego, they can all be linked to rituals or myths that confirmed his fitness to rule” (Koch).

Given that the Viking longship seems to be the culmination of a couple of thousand years of sailed boats with rowers, one would think that on all but the largest of them, rowing techniques were likely similar throughout.

“The first on board is that you´ll be put at a rowing spot and a chest to sit on. The row leader and some crew members delivers oars, first to the starboard and then to the portside rowers.

On given order lowers the starboard rowers their oars (without hurting anyone). The oar puts from inside the ship into the oar hole. Then the portside rowers have done the same is the ship ready to get rowed.

The leader gives the command All – Row’. Everybody takes ONE stroke with their oar.

The leader waits until everybody has taken their stroke, until he once again says ‘And – Row’, The leader slowly raises the stroke. No, we use no drums. It’s not needed. The rowers hold the stroke after a few strokes of oars just by looking at the first rower.

The leader don’t need to give the stroke. This is what we call silent rowing. That is important if you want to take the enemy by surprise. From now on the leader only gives steering commands.

You take the stroke of oars like this: You start with the oar in the ‘Basic position’. That means the oar between 1 to 1.5 inch from your stomach and the blade a bit above the water. When the leader gives the starts command e.g ‘All Rowers’, you move the oar handle forwards to the ‘Start position’. When the leader follows his command with ‘Row’, you take a short but steady stroke with your oar and move it back to the ‘Basic position’. The short stroke is to not get stuck with the oar. The steady stroke gives the ship its speed. It is important to take the stroke this way. It makes rowing easier. The most important is to take the oar back to the basic position after the stroke of oars. Why? Well, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to keep stroke when speed increases. After half a second’s rest, take the next stroke.” ( Långe )

In short, this wasn’t wasn’t some CrossFit erg test or a long distance skulling thing. Nor was it a cable rows with extra-stretched high reps- this was a sustained effort of very short bursts of strength of short-range muscular violence. It was far more like doing eight hours of rest pause single reps on a Pendlay row with 80% of your 1RM. Rather than a shitload of low-intensity volume like jogging, it was more like doing hilariously violent singles on cable row with the stack for six hours.

Which brings us to the lifters who swear by rows. The implement doesn’t matter so much as the effect when rowing, I’ve found. I’ve subsisted for months on high rep TRX-style rows and maintained my muscularity and much of my size. I’ve been big and crazy lean on singles and doubles on rows and deadlifts, and I’ve been biggest and strongest by combining a bunch of rep ranges and implements into a single workout. Nor am I talking about using some dumbass bar out of a lockbox or wasting a half hour on setup and breakdown of a strongman implement- I mean using explosive reps and crazy heavy short stroke reps with a barbell, Hammer Strength shit for medium range work, and dumbbells and cables for the high rep work. If you can’t do 8 reps with a 200lb dumbbell on one arm dumbbell row as a man, you’re either far too weak or far too small. Or both. Same goes for a chick with the 150lber.

Bodybuilding phenom Orville Burke was the one who coined the phrase “if you’re not rowing, you’re not training your back,” and the fact that he could cause a one-man eclipse by standing on the beach during a sunset meant he knew something about building a badass back. He managed an unheard-of-except-for-future-Mr Olympias top-ten finish in the Olympia in his rookie year, then finished in the top six twice before slipping into a coma during elbow surgery and dropping out of bodybuilding thereafter. In spite of the unfortunate end to his short career, Burke proved that a massive, thick back built on insane numbers of pullups and rows could propel you to the highest levels of the bodybuilding world, even in spite of watery glutes and hamstrings that would have resulted in last place finishes for any other athlete.

Early in life, the secret to Burke’s back was pullups.

‘My friends and I would do chins every day after school to see who was the strongest. When we started this competitive chins game, I had a very narrow back, but after months of doing chins every day, I eventually developed the V-taper you see today” (Merritt).

By the time he became a pro however, he’d dropped the pullups for rows. He’d train back before traps every five days. As I mentioned- it was seriously row-centric. Burke was famous for saying his “credo is that if you’re not rowing—and I mean with a barbell, a T-bar, or a dumbbell—then you’re not building your back” (Merritt). Half of Burke’s rather unremarkable back routine was rowing, and those movements are what gave him a back so overpowering that he’d jump four or five placings just on the weight of its awesomeness.

Front Pulldown– 4 x 10
Barbell Row– 4 x 8
One-Arm Dumbbell Row– 5 x 8
Deadlift– 5 x 8

Not everyone with a sick back has a dull training routine. Take, for instance, the example of the winningest athlete in Olympia- Iris Kyle. If you’re unaware of Iris Kyle, you need to educate yourself- she’s one of the chicks who should make people perk the fuck up when serious badasses in the training world are discussed, but like most chick bodybuilders she’s related to discussion as a potential sex object or a freakshow, due in large part because dudes can’t handle seeing a chick who’d fuck them up and then strap one on and fuck them if the need arose.

At 5’7″ and 180 lbs in the offseason, Kyle looked far bigger than the scale indicated and is well known for having a 375lb bench that she replicated on many occasions. Her appearance simply reflects her strength, because her best bodyparts were also her strongest. And instead of being known for her insane pecs, Kyle, who is the most successful professional bodybuilder ever with ten overall Ms. Olympia wins and two heavyweight wins, built her insane legacy on the mounds of striated muscle that comprised her back.

And unsurprisingly, her back routine bears out the lessons of history, as it includes a shitload of rowing volume.

Iris Kyle’s Blueprint for a Badass Back

Front Pulldowns– 4 x 10-12
Low Cable Rows– 4 x 10-12
One-Arm Dumbbell Rows– 4 x 10-12
Deadlifts– 4 x 15-10
T-Bar Rows (optional)– 4 x 10-12

Iris Kyle and her male Olympia compatriot, Ronnie Coleman, had very similar takes on back training (three of his four most common exercises were rows) as did his predecessor, Dorian. Likewise, Bill Kazmaier did a shitload of dumbbell rows in various positions on the chest and waist to aid in the myriad events that involve rowing something off the ground, like the log, sandbag, stones, keg, etc, and to help in shit like the truck pull (Thigpen).  Rows have built some of the best backs in strength sports and bodybuilding, but if history has proved anything, it’s that modern lifters neither know nor give two shits about history.

Four-time World’s Strongest Man winner and three-time Arnold Strongman Classic winner Brian Shaw is a massive fan of cable rows for back strength. His technique is unique and in every way unlike anything the Vikings would have done, but a row nonetheless.

Likewise, Eddie Hall has rows as a cornerstone of every back workout.  He uses massive weights and his rep ranges vary wildly, so he’ll take anywhere from a couple to ten minutes between sets. For back, he typically does deadlifts first, followed by two assistance exercises, like lat pulldowns and a rowing exercise (Plummer). These are marathon workouts that completely lack structure, and they involve long enough rest periods that his training sessions could take three to four hours.

And speaking of marathon training sessions, we come to my own methods. At present I find that I have one heavy and one light back day, in addition to 700 to two thousand pullups a week done at random throughout each day. I’ve got a TRX setup in the basement that I’ll occasionally use to do an hour or two of high rep rows for a light back workout with very short rests, or I will go to the gym and do every conceivable manner of grip, handle, and hand spacing configuration to do a wide array of reps ranging from 30 to 4 over the course of and hour to 90 minutes, again with short rest periods.

The nice thing about rows is that there are likely more permutations of that basic movement than you’ve ever considered, and doing something as simple as pulling face pulls to your chest can give you a weird pump you’ve never had before. The varied angles, implements, and grips will give you a degree of all-around strength and development that will allow you to move crazy weights when you’re grabbing weirdly shaped objects, and will ensure that you have no weird little weak points that leave you open to injury.

And even if rowing doesn’t give you a back badass enough that people will know your name in a thousand years, it will at the very least bestow you with a posterior chain full of rippling muscles capable of hypnotizing interested parties so you can lure them home for a a bout of hard fucking.

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Sources:

Ammianus Marcellinus.  The Later Roman Empire: (AD 354-378).  London: Penguin Books, 2004.

Diodorus Siculus. Library of History (Books III – VIII), trans. C. H. Oldfather. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935.  http://exploringcelticciv.web.unc.edu/diodorus-siculus-library-of-history/

Firth, Matt.  Blood eagles and fatal walks revisited: Orms þáttr Stórólfssonar.  The Postgrad Chronicles.   30 Jul 2019.  Web.  10 Dec 2019.  https://thepostgradchronicles.org/2019/07/30/blood-eagles-and-fatal-walks-revisited-orms-thattr-storolfssonar/

Flex Staff.  Ms. Olympia’s back.  Muscle & Fitness.  Web.  2 Dec 2019.  https://www.muscleandfitness.com/flexonline/training/ms-olympia-s-back

Långe, Ove.  Rowing a viking longship.  Wiking Longship.  2001.  Web.  13 Nov 2019.  http://www.vikingship.se/oldviking/roddE.html

Koch, Tim.  The Ancient Egyptian Rowing Stroke: Propelling the Boats of Gods and Men.  The The Boat Sing.  2 Mar 2018.  Web.  13 Nov 2019.  https://heartheboatsing.com/2018/03/02/the-ancient-egyptian-rowing-stroke-propelling-the-boats-of-gods-and-men/

Merritt, Greg.  Retro athlete: Orville Burke. Muscle & Fitness. Web. 12 Nov 2019. https://www.muscleandfitness.com/flexonline/ifbb/retro-athlete-orville-burke

Plummer, Jun. How to train like the world’s strongest man.  Muscle & Fitness.  Web.  1 Dec 2019.   https://www.muscleandfitness.com/workouts/athletecelebrity-workouts/how-train-worlds-strongest-man

Thigpen, Josh.  Top 5 assistance movements for strongmen.  Starting Strongman.  20 May 2019.  Web.  1 Dec 2019.  https://startingstrongman.com/2019/05/20/top-5-assistance-movements-for-strongman/

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