It’s interesting how much physical effort can go into things we wouldn’t normally consider exercise. We might bend down to pick up a full laundry basket, lift something from the back of the car, or reach toward the floor to move an object that’s heavier than we expected. Most of the time, we’re more focused on getting the task done than thinking about how we’re moving. Once it’s finished, we simply carry on. Those everyday demands offer a useful starting point for this week’s BUILD workout preview from Coach Ro’s STRONGER program.
The movements we practice with dumbbells don’t perfectly duplicate everything we encounter in daily life, but they can help us develop the muscular strength and coordination involved in handling physical demands.
Last week, BASE introduced the value of foundational exercises and why we continue practicing them as we become stronger. BUILD gives us an opportunity to look more closely at what happens during those exercises, particularly when we’re bending through the hips, supporting the upper body, and working against resistance. Developing strength involves more than lifting something heavier. It also involves understanding how different parts of our bodies contribute to the work.
The Movement Behind the Movement
When we watch someone lift a dumbbell, we tend to notice the weight first. We see the object moving and the muscles working to raise it, so it’s natural to associate the exercise with whichever body part appears to be doing most of the work. But there’s often more happening than we realize, particularly when an exercise requires us to maintain a position while moving the resistance.
Consider someone bending forward while holding a pair of dumbbells. Their arms may be supporting the weights, but the muscles around their hips, legs, and trunk are also contributing. Some muscles are helping move the weights, while others are working to support the body. We may notice one group working more than another, but that doesn’t mean the supporting muscles aren’t contributing.
This cooperation is one of the interesting things about resistance training. We often describe exercises according to the muscles they’re intended to strengthen, yet many movements require several muscle groups to work together. Understanding that relationship gives us a different way to look at the hinging and rowing exercises demonstrated in BUILD, where some muscles are responsible for moving the resistance while others contribute to supporting the body.
What to Expect in This BUILD Workout Preview
This week’s BUILD workout preview runs approximately six minutes and thirty-eight seconds and features Coach Ro demonstrating dumbbell exercises built around hinging and pulling movements.
You’ll see Ro perform forward-bending movements with dumbbells, including a staggered-stance variation in which one foot is positioned behind the other. The preview also includes bent-over dumbbell rows, where she maintains a forward-leaning position while pulling the weights toward her body.
These exercises place different demands on the muscles. During a hip-hinge movement, the hips and surrounding muscles play a significant role in lowering and raising the body. During a bent-over row, muscles of the upper back, shoulders, and arms contribute to pulling the dumbbells while other muscles help support the position of the torso.
As you watch, consider how Ro establishes her stance before beginning, how her body moves as she lowers the weights, and how she maintains her position during the rowing movements. You’ll also see that the work doesn’t end when the dumbbells reach the top of a repetition. How the weights return to their starting positions is another part of the exercise worth observing.
This video is a short guided preview from STRONGER, not the complete BUILD workout.
Preview length: Approximately 6 minutes, 38 seconds
Equipment: Dumbbells, with resistance suited to your ability
Workout emphasis: Hip-hinge movements, staggered-stance variations, and bent-over dumbbell rows
Understanding the Hip Hinge
One of the most useful movement patterns to understand in strength training is the hip hinge. The name may sound technical, but the basic idea is straightforward. Rather than lowering your body primarily by bending your knees as you might during a squat, a hip hinge places greater emphasis on moving your hips backward while your upper body inclines forward. Your knees still bend, and several joints contribute to the motion, but the hips play a particularly important role.
Think about standing with your feet comfortably apart and gently moving your hips backward as though you’re reaching toward a chair behind you. As your hips move back, your torso naturally begins to lean forward. When you return to standing, the muscles around your hips help bring your body upright again. It’s a relatively simple movement to observe, but performing it with resistance requires coordination between the hips, legs, and muscles supporting the trunk.
This pattern forms part of several familiar strength exercises, including the Romanian deadlift. The American Council on Exercise’s explanation of the Romanian deadlift describes how the exercise emphasizes movement through the hips and involves muscles along the back of the body, particularly the glutes and hamstrings. These muscles help manage the lowering phase and contribute to returning the body to standing.
A squat and a hip hinge aren’t completely unrelated. Both involve the hips and legs, and many movements combine elements of each. The distinction is largely one of emphasis. A squat generally involves substantial bending through the hips and knees, while a hinge places greater emphasis on hip movement. Learning to recognize that difference gives us another way to understand what we’re asking our bodies to do during an exercise.
There’s also an important consideration when it comes to how far we bend. Someone watching Ro demonstrate a hinge may assume they should lower their dumbbells to exactly the same position. But our proportions, mobility, strength, and training experience can all influence the range we can manage comfortably. One person may feel considerable effort with a relatively small movement, while another may be able to hinge farther without difficulty.
The distance the dumbbells travel isn’t the only measure of a successful repetition. What matters is whether we’re moving through the intended pattern, managing the resistance, and using a range that suits our current abilities. As we become more experienced, that range may change, but reaching farther shouldn’t become more important than understanding the movement itself.
The Strength We Don’t Always Notice
When people think about developing stronger legs, they often picture squats or lunges. Those exercises are valuable, but they aren’t the only ways to challenge the lower body. Hip-hinge movements place considerable emphasis on muscles along the back of the body, including the glutes and hamstrings, while muscles around the trunk help manage the position of the torso.
These supporting muscles don’t always attract our attention because their work may be less visible. We can easily recognize that something is happening when we bend our knees, extend our hips, or pull a dumbbell upward. It’s less obvious when muscles are generating effort to help us maintain a position rather than producing a large movement.
Imagine holding a pair of dumbbells while leaning forward. Even before you begin pulling the weights toward your body, you’re asking muscles around your hips and trunk to help support that position. Sometimes people are surprised by how much effort this requires, especially when they’re concentrating on the muscles performing the more obvious movement. The exercise hasn’t stopped being work simply because you’re momentarily holding still. Some muscles are helping maintain your position while others prepare to move the resistance.
This helps explain why a bent-over exercise may feel demanding in places other than the muscles we initially intended to train. Depending on the movement, the amount of weight, and our conditioning, maintaining the position itself can require considerable effort.
There’s an important distinction between that muscular effort and pain, however. Feeling the muscles around the trunk working doesn’t automatically indicate a problem, but sharp pain, increasing discomfort, or difficulty maintaining a manageable position are reasons to stop and reassess the exercise. Reducing resistance, changing the movement, or using a supported variation may allow us to continue working toward the intended training goal without forcing an uncomfortable position.
Pulling Strength Needs Support
Bent-over dumbbell rows provide a useful example of how supporting muscles and moving muscles work together. While muscles around the hips and trunk help maintain the forward-leaning position, muscles of the upper back, shoulders, and arms contribute to pulling the weights toward the body. Both contributions matter, even though the rowing movement is what we notice most.
It’s easy to concentrate entirely on how high the dumbbells travel. We might assume that bringing the weights closer to our body, or lifting them a little farther with each repetition, means we’re performing the exercise more effectively. But the amount of movement doesn’t tell us everything about how the exercise is being performed.
Sometimes we don’t realize how much we’re changing an exercise just to move a heavier weight. During a row, for example, we might begin lifting our torso or swinging the dumbbells without really noticing. We’re still moving the weight, but we may no longer be performing the exercise the way we intended.
Different training methods sometimes use deliberate changes in body position or momentum, but when our purpose is to perform a controlled bent-over row, unexpected movement may indicate that the resistance is too demanding for that particular variation. Using a lighter weight can give us an opportunity to maintain our position and concentrate on the pulling movement itself.
The Mayo Clinic’s demonstration of a bent-over dumbbell row provides another example of maintaining a stable torso position while moving resistance with the upper body.
An unsupported bent-over row also isn’t the only way to develop pulling strength. Someone who finds maintaining the forward-leaning position difficult may benefit from a bench-supported row or another variation that provides greater support. That adjustment can make it easier to concentrate on the intended pulling muscles without having to manage the same demands on the hips and trunk.
Understanding the exercise’s purpose allows us to choose a version that challenges the muscles we want to train while respecting our current capabilities.
Why Changing Your Stance Changes the Exercise
Another detail worth noticing in BUILD is the staggered stance Ro uses during part of the preview. Positioning one foot slightly behind the other may seem like a small change, but it can influence how an exercise feels and how the body manages resistance.
With both feet positioned side by side, we generally have a relatively symmetrical starting position. Moving one foot behind the other changes that relationship. Depending on where we place our weight, how far apart our feet are, and how we perform the exercise, one leg may take a larger share of the work while the other contributes to balance and support. The movement can also require us to pay closer attention to how we’re positioning our hips.
For someone accustomed to a traditional two-footed hinge, the variation may make them more aware of differences between their legs or how their balance changes as the dumbbells move. That can be useful when the goal is to explore how each side contributes to the movement, but it doesn’t automatically make the staggered stance more effective or more advanced. There are also times when keeping both feet in a more stable, symmetrical position allows us to concentrate more fully on the hinge or handle greater resistance. Rather than assuming a different position is automatically an improvement, we can consider what the change actually does and whether it serves our purpose.
The Return Is Part of the Exercise
When we think about lifting a weight, we usually picture the moment when the weight moves upward. That’s the most noticeable part of many exercises, but lowering the resistance is also part of the work. During a dumbbell hinge, the muscles around the hips help manage the movement as the torso inclines forward. During a row, the muscles involved in pulling also help control the return as the dumbbells move away from the body. In both cases, we’re asking our muscles to manage resistance throughout the movement rather than concentrating only on the lifting portion.
The lowering phase of many resistance exercises involves what is called eccentric muscle action. This occurs when a muscle produces force while lengthening, allowing it to help control movement against resistance. During a row, for example, the muscles involved in pulling the dumbbell toward the body also contribute as the weight returns downward. The type of muscular action changes, but the muscles haven’t simply stopped working.
It’s an interesting distinction because we sometimes treat the return as something that happens after the important part of the exercise is finished. We concentrate on lifting the dumbbell, then allow it to drop quickly toward the starting position so we can begin the next repetition.
Different training goals call for different movement speeds, and slower isn’t automatically better. But when we’re learning an exercise or practicing controlled resistance training, paying attention to how the weight returns can help us recognize whether we’re managing the load throughout the repetition. It also gives us an opportunity to observe how our body responds as the direction of the movement changes.
Think about lowering a pair of dumbbells during a hinge. If we feel that we have to rush toward the bottom of the movement or struggle to control where the weights travel, we may need to reconsider the resistance or the range we’re using. Similarly, during a row, being able to return the weights without unexpectedly changing our torso position can tell us something about how well we’re managing the exercise.
I’ve found that this is a useful way to think about repetitions. We sometimes become so focused on completing the lifting portion that we overlook how we’re getting back to the starting position. Yet that return gives us another opportunity to practice managing the resistance, recognize whether the weight suits our abilities, and develop greater familiarity with the exercise.
Bringing These Movements Into Daily Life
One of the things I’ve learned through coaching is that people often understand an exercise differently once they recognize why it might matter to them. A hip hinge is a good example because bending and lifting are things we do regularly, even though the circumstances outside the gym can be quite different from a controlled workout.
In a gym, we can usually choose our equipment, adjust our stance, and decide how much resistance to use before beginning an exercise. Outside the gym, the situation may be less predictable. We might need to shift our feet to reach around a piece of furniture, change our grip because an object has uneven handles, or adjust our position because there isn’t much room to move. These are practical demands that aren’t always represented by a single exercise performed in a controlled setting.
Real-life lifting can involve a combination of bending through the hips and knees, reaching, adjusting our stance, and changing our balance to accommodate what we’re trying to accomplish. We may also be dealing with objects that aren’t evenly weighted or that require us to move in an unfamiliar direction.
That’s why I think we need to be careful about suggesting that a particular gym exercise directly teaches us how to handle every physical task. Practicing hip-hinge exercises doesn’t guarantee that every lift in daily life will be comfortable or prevent injuries. The circumstances, objects, and physical demands we encounter are too varied for that kind of promise. What resistance training can do is help us develop muscular strength and become more familiar with handling a load through certain movement patterns.
The same applies to rowing exercises. A bent-over row isn’t identical to every pulling task we might encounter, but strengthening the muscles involved can contribute to our overall physical capacity. As our strength develops, we may have more ability to draw upon when an activity requires physical effort.
Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate that an exercise doesn’t need to look exactly like something we do outside the gym to have value. We’re developing strength in different parts of the body, learning how to handle resistance, and gradually increasing what we’re capable of doing. Those abilities can serve us in many different situations, including ones we might not anticipate when we’re working out.
This Week’s Challenge
This week, I’d like you to pay attention to something that often gets overlooked during strength training: where the movement is coming from and what your body is doing to support it.
If you’re comfortable practicing a hip hinge, begin without weights. Stand in a position that feels stable, keep a soft bend in your knees, and gently move your hips backward while allowing your torso to incline forward. Return to standing without rushing, noticing how your hips, legs, and trunk contribute to the movement. You don’t need to bend very far or turn this into an elaborate technique exercise. The purpose is simply to become more aware of how the movement works.
If you’re already comfortable using dumbbells, you can apply that same attention while following Ro’s BUILD preview. During the hinge movements, consider how you lower and return to standing. During the rows, see whether you can maintain a manageable position while the dumbbells move. Give the lowering portion of each repetition some of the same attention you give to lifting the weights.
Then, sometime during the week, recognize an ordinary activity that involves bending, lifting, or pulling. You don’t need to turn that task into a gym exercise or force yourself into one particular posture. Simply consider what your body is being asked to do and how the strength you’re developing may relate to it.
What I’d like you to take from this challenge is a better understanding of what happens throughout a movement. It’s natural to focus on the weight itself, but there’s also the effort involved in supporting our bodies, making adjustments, and handling the resistance on its way back down. The more we understand those details, the more our training becomes something we’re actively learning from rather than simply following instructions.
Continuing to Build Strength
With BASE, we began our STRONGER series by considering why foundational exercises remain valuable throughout our training. BUILD adds another layer by exploring how different muscles contribute to bending, supporting our bodies, pulling resistance, and controlling its return.
As we continue through the program, I hope these weekly previews encourage you to look beyond exercise names and think about what each movement is helping you develop. There will always be opportunities to lift heavier weights, learn different exercises, and take on new challenges as your abilities change. Those are worthwhile parts of strength training, but understanding what we’re doing can make the process more meaningful.
STRONGER is available through Z Physique’s Platinum Membership and 12-Week Body Transformation program, with an individual purchase option also available. If you’d like to experience the complete guided workouts, you can explore our online fitness memberships and programs and choose the option that suits your goals.
Start Building Healthier Habits
Building strength is one part of taking care of ourselves, but what we do outside our workouts matters as well. The way we move throughout the day, how we nourish our bodies, the sleep we get, and the time we allow for recovery all contribute to our overall health.
We don’t have to change every habit at once. Often, the most practical place to begin is with something manageable that we can return to consistently, even when life becomes busy. If you’re looking for a starting point, our Healthy Lifestyle Starter Guide offers practical ideas for building healthier routines that fit into everyday life.
