Can't feel barbell row in lats

Grip wider and minimize your body movement to feel the row in your lats. This should make you feel your lats during the row.

What is your why

Before we go into the details of why you might not feel the barbell rows in your last let me ask you a couple of questions:

Why do you want to barbell row?
Why do you want to get stronger?
Why do you want to build muscle?
What happens when you do?
What happens if you don’t?

These questions might not seem obvious to you. They are crucial for your long term success. Life will get in the way of your ambitions and you better have good reasons to keep pushing forward. Taking some time to reflect on your underlying motivations will pay dividends. The less likely it becomes that you quit the more likely it will be that you succeed.

Most people guide their life in this way:

What do I want
How do I get It
Why do I want it

With this approach, you will be chasing your own tail. What you want changes hundreds of times a day. It depends highly on what and who you surround yourself with. It depends on what you see, eat and which season it is. If you focus solely on what you want it will not make you happy. Your actions and thought a will be a beautiful mess and frustrate you in the long run.

If you flip this on its head it gets very interesting.

Why do you want something
How do you get it
What do you need to do to get it

This way you will connect all of your thoughts and actions to one common goal. Connecting to a common purpose will make it more likely to succeed and get support. If you want to know how this works on a psychological level read Daniel Kahneman's thinking fast and small. Still not convinced? Watch Simon Sinek's TED talk on the golden circle. He makes a very compelling case telling the story of the Wright brothers.

Barbell row

The barbell row is a great movement to train your back and bringing up your deadlift maximum. Most high performing deadlifters and bodybuilding champions use it for these purposes.

The movement starts on the ground. You either bring the barbell to your hips or knees. From there you bring the barbell up to your chest. You repeat the process for more repetitions. This is the basic idea. The challenge he is that there are many different ways of doing this.

Hand placement

The first thing to think about is hand placement. The wider your hands are apart the more likely it is that you will feel the barbell row in your lats. The closer the hands get the more you can pull from the traps, triceps, and biceps. This is one of the main reasons why you do not feel the barbell row in your lats.

Be mindful that the wider you grip the bar the less weight you will be able to use for the movement. Check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Body English

Body English refers to how much you move your body during the barbell row. One school argues that you should keep your back straight and move the body as little as possible during the row. The other school claims that the best way to do the row is to be as savage as possible and use your body to move the barbell.

Great examples are the Yates and pendulum row. These allow for body English and are popular with strongmen and powerlifters. The more you care about strength rather than muscle growth, the more body English is allowed.