Renegade Row: How to Do It, Muscles Worked and Common Mistakes

A renegade row is a dumbbell row done from a plank, and the reason it's harder than the sum of its parts is rotation. The moment you lift one hand off the floor, your body is being pulled sideways, and stopping that happening is where the exercise lives. Do it right and you're training your lats and your obliques at the same time, from one position, with two dumbbells. Do it wrong and you're doing a wobbly row while your hips swing like a gate.

How to do a renegade row

Use hex dumbbells. Round dumbbells roll and will eventually tip a wrist.

1. Set up the plank. Place two dumbbells on the floor about shoulder-width apart. Grip the handles and get into a push up position with your hands stacked under your shoulders, wrists neutral and knuckles facing forward.
2. Widen your feet. Take your feet out to at least shoulder-width, wider if you're new to the movement. A narrow stance is the single biggest reason people can't stop the twist.
3. Brace everything. Squeeze your glutes, pull your ribs down, and think about pushing the floor away with both hands so your shoulder blades stay spread rather than sagging between them.
4. Row one dumbbell. Drive your elbow back towards your hip, keeping it fairly close to your body, and pull the dumbbell to your ribcage. Your shoulders and hips should stay square to the floor throughout, as if a glass of water is balanced on your lower back.
5. Lower with control. Put the dumbbell back on the floor quietly. If it clatters, you dropped it rather than lowering it.
6. Switch sides. Reset your brace and repeat with the other arm. Alternate for the whole set.

Muscles worked

• Lats, rhomboids and mid traps. The rowing arm gets a genuine back workout, though at a load well below what you'd handle on a dumbbell row from a bench.
• Obliques and transverse abdominis. The stars of the exercise. They resist the trunk rotation created by having weight on one side only, and that anti-rotation demand is what separates the renegade row from every other row.
• Rear delts and biceps. Both assist the pull, as in any rowing pattern.
• Chest, front delt and triceps of the supporting arm. They work isometrically to hold half your bodyweight in a single-arm plank while the other arm rows.
• Glutes and quads. They keep your hips level and stop your lower back sagging into an arch.

There's decent evidence behind the anti-rotation claim. When researchers compared unilateral and bilateral resistance exercises, the external oblique showed roughly 81% greater activation during unilateral seated work than the bilateral equivalent, with the rectus abdominis about 49% higher (Saeterbakken et al., European Journal of Applied Physiology, 2012). Loading one side at a time forces your core to work, and the renegade row takes that principle to its logical conclusion by doing it from a plank.

Common mistakes

Hips rotating with every rep. If your pelvis swings towards the rowing side, you've stopped training anti-rotation and started training rotation under load. Widen your feet, cut the weight, and slow the tempo down.

Feet too close together. Related, and easy to fix. A narrow stance gives you almost no base to resist against. Go wide until the twist disappears, then narrow gradually over weeks as a progression.

Sagging hips. Watch for your lower back dipping and your belly drooping towards the floor. That's a plank fault, not a row fault, and it means your core gave up before your back did. Build the plank first.

Rowing with round dumbbells. They roll under load, your wrist buckles, and the dumbbell escapes. Hex dumbbells only.

Going too heavy. The most common ego problem here. Renegade rows are limited by trunk stability, not back strength, so the weight that feels absurdly light for a normal row is usually about right.

Progressions and regressions

Build up rather than jumping straight in with 20kg dumbbells.

• Plank shoulder taps. No weight at all. Tap each shoulder with the opposite hand from a plank, keeping hips dead still. This is the anti-rotation skill in isolation.
• Renegade row from the knees. Same movement, knees down, which shortens the lever and cuts the rotational torque substantially.
• Renegade row with feet wide. The standard version, feet well outside shoulder-width.
• Renegade row with feet narrow. Bring your feet closer together over time. Getting to a hip-width stance with no rotation is a genuine achievement.
• Renegade row plus push up. Add a push up between each row for a full upper body movement. Fair warning: your heart rate will not appreciate it.

How to program it

Renegade rows work best in the middle of a session, after your heavy pressing or pulling and before your finishers, when you're fresh enough to hold form but not spending your best sets on a light-load exercise. Three or four sets of 6 to 8 reps per side is the sweet spot.

They're an efficient choice if you're training at home with limited kit, since one pair of dumbbells covers back, core and shoulder stability at once. Don't let them replace real rowing volume though. If your back is the priority, do bent over rows or pull ups for load and use renegade rows as the core work afterwards. Two full-body strength sessions a week is the minimum the NHS suggests for adults, and a movement that trains pulling and bracing together helps you hit that in less time.

Worth adding: prone-position core exercises like this one recruit the abdominals about as well as classic supine work, while side-lying variations bias the obliques and lumbar paraspinals harder (Escamilla et al., Sports Health, 2016). Rotate through positions across the week rather than doing renegade rows on repeat.

What you need

A pair of hex dumbbells and floor space. A set of hex dumbbells in the 8kg to 12kg range covers most people for this movement, and if you'd rather not own a rack of fixed weights, some adjustable dumbbells work as long as the handles sit flat and the plates don't rattle. A mat under your hands and feet helps on hard floors and stops the dumbbells sliding on tile.

Recommended reads

• Dumbbell Row Guide
• Plank: How to Do It
• Best Hex Dumbbells UK
• Best Adjustable Dumbbells UK
• Workout and exercise guides