I will try to explain as best as I can. I’ve watched videos of Alan Thrall and Jordan doing barbell rows. Technically I guess pendlay rows. When they do it they use a lot of english and swing to complete the movement. I do mine like that as well and it’s hard for me to judge the RPE when I’m using momentum to complete the movement. Would it be best to drop the weight and do a more strict row where i could better judge the RPE? I hope I am being clear here. I’m in week 5 of The Bridge where you switch to paused deadlift from the rack pull. Would it be too much to swap the barbell row on the middle day for RDL’s or would that be too much?
Yes you can use body English. Rows are just one of those things that are very difficult to rate RPE for. I still haven’t quite gotten it down to a science myself (I actually just mentioned this in my logs the other day, so good timing, haha). But the good news is that RPE doesn’t have to be precise, good enough is well… good enough.
As far as substituting them for RDL’s, what is the why behind you wanting to do the substitution? You can obviously do whatever you want, but my answer of if it would make sense would vary depending on your intentions and specific goal set really.
I think that if you have an idea of how much English you’d like to have, and the weight gets heavy enough to where you are using more than you like, I would take that into consideration when assigning a number to your rpe. The best thing to do is try and keep the English right where you want it, regardless of how heavy the weight is. Just trust yourself and your experience :-).
I’m guessing you’re coming off an LP and you may not have the experience doing them to really know how your body handles them. The more you do them, the clearer the rpe picture will get.
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I was thinking substituting rows for RDL’s because it’s a closer variation of the deadlift I believe. I guess just trust the program though. I’ve seen the best results from BBM methodology than anything else.
Eh, I’m not entirely sure either has much of a direct effect on deadlifts to be honest. RDL’s, while a more similar movement pattern, are so much lighter in weight to where direct strength transfer isn’t going to be great. But both are definitely very good at building muscle mass, which will aid deadlift in the future. Rows have an added benefit that the muscle mass built also can carry over to the bench. You don’t always have to train everything as specific as possible, especially if you’re not going to be competing or testing in the near future. But if in your goals you care about your deadlifts long term development above your bench, and you feel that you would benefit from trading some upper back hypertrophy for some posterior chain hypertrophy, or if your past training history showed that RDL’s are a variation that really works especially well for you, then the swap would be a logical one.