Upper back exercises with a barbell

What ends a heavy set?

There are three candidates: your position, your back and your hands. The catalog cues on the free barbell circle almost entirely around the first. Keep your back flat, do not round your shoulders, do not rock your torso, pick a weight that does not cost you technique - these are all descriptions of the same limit, the point where the bent-over position stops holding. The muscle itself gives up surprisingly rarely in a barbell row.

The second limit is in your hands, and it shows up most clearly in shrugs. Your arms hang straight through the whole movement there, so your traps will handle far more than your fingers will hold, and the set usually ends on the grip. Straps and a mixed grip move that ceiling but do not delete it. The exception in this family is the overhead shrug: there neither the traps nor the fingers decide, but whether you can hold the bar overhead with straight arms in one place.

If you want to take position out of the equation, the catalog gives you a way to do that with a barbell too. Overhand and underhand rows on an incline bench, head up, put your torso on the pad, and then only the pull and the grip are left. That is a sensible pick on a day when your lower back has already had its share from deadlifts.

Free barbell or landmine?

A free barbell hangs straight down, the path is a straight line, your hands are locked at one distance apart, and the whole load is in your hands. In a landmine one end of the bar sits in the attachment, so the bar travels on an arc and part of the weight goes into the mount. What you are actually pulling is less than what you loaded onto the bar, and comparing those two numbers makes no sense.

The catalog separates the targets too. The two-handed version with a V-handle brings the bar to the chest, the one-arm Meadows row to the lower ribs, and the long landmine row out toward your side. Each one is a different path for the elbow, even though the equipment is standing in the same place.

The landmine has one advantage a free barbell will not reproduce: it turns the bar into a one-handed tool. If you want to load one side on its own and the dumbbells at your gym stop at a weight that stopped being a challenge, the Meadows row and the long row are the only versions on this list that let you do it.