Back Workout Blunders - 5 Back Workout Mistakes to AVOID!

Build a Bigger Back with ATHLEAN-X - http://athleanx.com/x/backworkoutblunders

it’s time to go back to school on back training we’re going to cover today the five biggest blunders that you can make when you’re training your back and make sure that you don’t make them so you can get the most out of your workout the next time you hit the gym [Music] what’s up everybody Jeff Cavalier athleanx. com uh here in the gym to cover what I think are the five biggest blunders when it comes to training your back if you haven’t already seen the tricep series that we covered the seven SS of tricep training this is going to be a very similar approach I hope that you can benefit from CU I think it’s covering a lot of things that you might be overlooking now if you notice I’ve got a new uh attire here this is going to match my athenex um uniform it I actually broke a pinky and I’m going to have to wear this for the next 6 weeks so if you see this you know that um we’re still recovering first and foremost for our back we want to cover a principle that I think people Overlook yes it’s a huge muscle group but what you want to do is you want to kind of train zones and one of the zones I feel people Overlook is the upper back and that ties into the traps and people always write in I want Tom Hardy traps or Brock Lesnar type traps it’s going to come from not just doing shrugs guys but incorporating upper back training into what you do for your for your back so what I’ve done here is set up a pulley which don’t freak out you can do it with bands you just got to you hook your bands around anything stable that’s not going to move put them around knee height or thigh height and then you’re going to back up okay I’m going to talk about this posture in three here cuz you’re going to see I’ve already addressed that and how important that becomes but you set your back your arms and out in front of you and then you’re going to pull straight back okay so by having this angle of pull here in this Lean Forward I can now Target way up on the upper back as if I’m almost doing an inverted pull down okay so squeezing it through here back okay so want to make sure that when you’re training your back you’re h it from different angles so that you cover and attack the large areas of this large muscle group now moving on from the upper back we always have to sort of train the low back in the aex program we have our reverse hyperextensions using a fizzy ball well we can also kind of take that to another level as well by putting yourself into a position to do a hyperextension exercise right so all you have to do is Anchor Your Feet Under or anything anything stable okay get yourself in position over the top of a ball so that you can do a hyp extension and Target that low back area what we can do to make it even more intense is I’ll grab one of the athlan elastics bands wrap it once as I come up I pull apart okay come down let it go up pull apart down okay so again we’re always tying in upper and lower back the same way we did on the last exercise even though I was targeting the upper back by setting my low back the way I did we’re work in the low back too so athletex training is always about integrating muscle groups to work together all right the way that they prefer to work but you want to make sure that you’re never leaving any part out so another major Point hit that low back every time you’re training your back okay so back to back our next Point our third point about setting the back I alluded to it in both the first and second points we already covered and that is when you’re going to do any exercise I don’t care if it’s squatting if it’s deadlifting if it’s rowing in this case the example that we showed in the beginning of the video you you always want to start by setting your back first we covered this in a video once before on how to improve your strength in every lift and it’s by making this simple adjustment posture and setting the low back so from here I stick the butt out all right right at the camera and as far back as I can go I want to get my pelvis to tilt that way once I do that you can already see the low back is engaged that sets the stage for me to now push or pull with authority right if I’m moving my low back on every rep right swaying and moving I’m getting a lot of dispersion of force through my whole body cuz it’s kind of waving right it’s not ever stable when I lock the back in place now we can push off of a stable platform if you had to think of it another way if someone going to test your vertical jump and you had a chance to jump off of either a solid ground or jump off of a canoe how high do you think you jump off of the ground versus the canoe I can tell you you would not jump high off the canoe because as soon as you tried to put Force into the canoe it would rock and give way and you wouldn’t be able to push off of it with any Authority it’s the same exact concept here you have to set this so that you can then lift and pull with authority guys set the back to set the stage for better back growth on every exercise that you do next up over here at a pull-up bar or this is just a Smith machine that we’re going to use as a pull-up bar but the idea is one that I’ve covered before it’s about how you do your pull-ups and more specifically what type of grip are you using when I do pull-ups and when I advise guys who want to get the most out of their back development as opposed to sort of working too much of their forearms or grip is to use a false grip or to use an open grip so we’re really just looking at using our hands as hooks so I actually have less fingers over here I think it’s perfect to use this hand for this I can actually do these pullups with two fingers you just hook two here and two here you come up you can do pull-ups it’s not very difficult you can probably even do it with one although I don’t want to try that cuz I don’t have any good fingers left but the idea is you’re not using your hands at all to do it what happens is when you use your false grip you’re now allowing your elbows to do the work okay I’m thinking about my elbow pulling down closer to my sides so from here pulling it down here pulling it down okay the advantage here is that I’m not involving the forearm okay if I start doing this and grabbing the bar now I start pulling with my forearm a lot of guys can actually start to feel elbow pain by doing that you can eliminate that pain and then likely have to get that pain while while also getting more out of your back workouts by switching to the false grip all right last but not least this is one of the ones that I think people Overlook all of the time it’s extremely important it has nothing to do with a single exercise but again how you’re performing the exercise and it’s about contraction versus momentum especially when you’re doing pulling exercises the tendency is to let momentum do all the work and I’ll tell you why in a second here I when I do a pulling exercise if I let momentum get involved it’s very easy for me to lean back and Pull and lean back and pull because I have the ability to generate momentum with pulling think of a bench press it’s hard to generate a lot of momentum cuz you’re already pinned up underneath the bench or on the bench and you’re trying to push away but you can’t really get a lot of momentum when you push okay no matter what exercise it is when you’re pushing most of the time it’s very easy though even on a bicep curl get a lot of momentum when you’re pulling so particularly on your biceps and back training you want to make sure you eliminate the momentum and you let the muscle actually do the work so I don’t care if you’re doing a that pull down what you should do is let the muscle contract and then obviously that Ecentric control on the way back but let the muscle do the work and not the momentum when I do this I think I’m training my back but I’