Back Workout Tips for Size (HARDGAINER EDITION!)

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JEFF: What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. The Hardgainer Series continues. This time we’re hitting the back.

Jessie’s here again. Don’t stare a hole in the camera. Be careful. What we want to do is we want to show you the different things that I really want to focus on. Anybody that has a hard time building their back, there are certain things you need to focus on.

We’re going to go station by station to give you the best of what you need to know. Right here, the lat pulldown is a great place to start for a lot of different reasons. Jessie, go ahead and grab the bar. You can change the orientation of your body. You can change the grip width on the bar.

You can change whether or not you’re doing an overhand, or an underhand grip. All of these things will have a different impact on the area of the back you’re working and that is what we need to do. Remember, hard gainers; mind-muscle connection. We need to develop it. Jessie, go ahead and start pulling down.

This is a classic, to the front, upright, pulldown where he’s going to focus on trying to pull in here with the lat squeezing. And of course – slow down – pull down, but slow down. He’s got a hook grip on the bar over there because he’s not trying to squeeze here and get involvement of the forearms, or biceps. He’s trying to squeeze with the lats. Go ahead.

Come back up and squeeze. Pull down. There you go. So he’s squeezing and pulling the elbows down, and into his sides with his elbows a little bit in front of his body to get that arm in that scapular plane. Go ahead and rest for a second.

The next thing he could do is go underhand, or overhand. So if he goes underhand I know that I could get him to get a better lat contraction and feel because we’re getting a better pre-stretch of the muscle in front of our body. When the elbow is out here it’s a better stretch on our lat. So go ahead and pull down, and then it’s a nice stretch at the top, and pull down, and squeeze. Okay, so I want him to be able to do that.

The next thing is, the other muscles in the back; the upper back. We can get more teres major, which is up here under the armpit, and then the upper back muscles up here by focusing on the grip width – go ahead, Jessie. Get a wide grip, which is going to hit more of the teres major. As we come down you’ll see this area of his back work. Right here.

Right there. We can actually point muscles out on Jessie now, which is great. You feel that in this area? So again, more of that and then we can narrow up just a little bit on the bar, but lean back just a little bit. As soon as Jessie leans back, now because the target of the bar is going more toward his upper chest you can see now that we’re working a lot more of these upper back, here.

Thanks, Jessie. So the idea is to use this in all different variations, in all different ways, in all different grip widths to feel the muscles working and make sure that you have a good mind-muscle connection. The next thing we try to do is correct this common mistake that a lot of us do, especially when we’re early to training, which is over involvement of the biceps when we’re doing pulling exercises. So we’re going to head over here to the one-armed row. All right, the one-armed row is a great opportunity to help fix one of these compensation issues: the over involvement of the biceps when doing pulling exercises.

Jessie, let’s do a one-armed row. So with a one-armed row, what you see people do most commonly is, they know they’ve got to get the dumbbell up to here somewhere. So what happens? They go, and they row. And they row.

And they hammer curl. And they hammer curl. Right? Basically, Jessie is hammer curling this thing up to the top, which is a lot of involvement of the bicep. But we know that if you want to get the lat to work this elbow has to get behind the body.

Now he wants to try to keep it as close as he can to his side here, maintaining good posture through his spine, but he needs to get it behind his body, into extension. So what I tell him to do is, imagine there’s a brace on your elbow, and imaginary brace that basically stops your elbow at 90 degrees. Once it gets to 90, then you focus on pulling the arm back, behind the body the rest of the way. So down, you can get a nice stretch by allowing the arm to actually float in front of you, for the same reason that the underhand grip on the pulldown gave you a good stretch. But from here you pull 90, and then lock it up, and let the rest of it go into extension behind your body.

So again, good back position. There you go. Then you can get a little bit of a pre-stretch on the lat by going there. You can even see it. now as he pulls up and he pulls until about 90, imaginary, it’s locked, and then it’s pulling tight, to his side, and then behind his body.

Okay, down. Up. And pull. There you go. So you’ve got to have the ability to lock it up at 90, and then get behind the body.

Remember, try to keep it as tight to your side as you can. There you go. Just like that. So remember, get the biceps out of the exercise as much as you can. They’re, of course, going to work because you’re flexing your elbow, but you don’t want them to dominate the movement because your back will never get to work.

Next thing we need to do if we’re going to get the gains we should be as hard gainers, is you’ve got to train through failure, not just “to” failure. We use the pullup as a great way to do that. Okay, so now the pullup gives us the opportunity to, not just train to failure, but learn how to train through failure. This is the big thing you want to switch up, though. Most people will go to a pullup bar and let’s say they do only one, or two, or three.

They don’t do a lot of pullups. They might use an assisted – first of all they might skip the exercise altogether, which is a major mistake. This is one of the best exercises to build into your program to build that base, and to start getting bigger off that base. You need to do pullups and they’ll go with an assisted option, with a band, but they’ll start with that and say “Well, I know assisted I can do maybe 10, 11, 12. A more respectable number of pullups.

” But that’s not helping in the long run. What I need him to do – and everybody out there watching – is more pullups. So I want to see how many full, unassisted pullups you can do. Whether it be one, or two it doesn’t matter. You do those to failure first, then you step into the band, and then you rep out to failure again, doing as many assisted as you can because ultimately, the goal is to get you to do more unassisted pullups.

So do them, as many as you can because otherwise, if you just focus on the assisted pullups every rep you did there was assisted. I don’t know how many you could do without the assistance there for you. So we need to build up the actual exercise. So we wrap the band around the bar here, we get it out of the way, Jessie starts with the pullups, he goes full. Let’s say he could do three.

I know you’re a machine now, Jessie, but let’s say you can do three. Okay, so on the third one he’s done. Go ahead. He immediately steps in here, gets in, now he’s got – as quickly a transition as he can make here – he now goes into his assisted pullup. This particular band here takes about 60lbs off his bodyweight.

Which, for Jessie puts him at -20. He’s not. That’s not true. Go ahead. Keep going.

All right. So he goes all the way to failure there. Good job. He goes all the way to failure and that’s his set. So you want to make sure that you’re doing the same thing.

Focus on getting the full ones, even if it’s just one, and build off of that. That way you’re going to start getting stronger. I guarantee you, your pullup number will go up. The last component here we always talk about in these hard ga