Best Back Workout Video Ever (HIT EVERY MUSCLE!!)

Build a complete back with this workout - http://athleanx.com/x/the-complete-physique

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today we’re going to do the definitive back training workout video for you. This is why: because I’m breaking out four damned markers for you guys.

As a matter of fact, it’s a whole new package of markers to make sure the - Jeff muscle markers – that you get what we’re talking about when it comes to back training. Look, first and foremost, people don’t give the back the respect it deserves. Because they can’t see it they don’t want to train it. Those that are training a little bit more seriously, of course you’ll train your back, but as you’ll see by the time this video’s done, there’s a lot more going on in the back than the lats. As a matter of fact, you can see, I’ve got a whole damned road map going on back here and a lot of ink was used to make sure that we get you to understand that.

So I’m going to break it down muscle by muscle and tell you why you need to do certain things and what the best exercises are to target those areas so you have a better understanding the next time you attack your back workout. Okay, let’s start with the lats. That’s probably the one that you’re, at least, training. So what we want to do is look at the anatomy of the lats to better understand what they do. They feed into the “X” in our back.

Not just me. I’m not the only one that has an X implanted in my back. It’s actually something we all should strive for. What that is, that’s the lat, as it feeds down and in, and you’ll have the X that kind of goes like this in your back. It’s the thoracic-lumbar fascia that the lats will feed into.

We’ll talk about that muscle in a second. It feeds into it there, and then they fan up, and around. So how would you train these? Well, you want to make sure that you’re pulling your arms down and into your sides, and we’re going to do that with exercises like pull ups, or as I’m showing you here, a lat pull down. Why is it that you might feel it more, or at least more of a stretch when you’re doing an underhand lat pulldown, as I’m showing you here?

Well, look at the anatomy again. If I have my arms in front of my body like this, instantly you see that I’m getting more stretch, more of a lengthening here of the lat as it reaches all the way around the back, and up around here at the top. Whereas, if I put my arm to the side here, I’ve just taken away all that extra stretch. So you might feel it more by doing an underhand version of this. Both of them are ultimately going to end down at your side, at peak contraction of the lats, but you’re going to at least have an understanding now, why one may feel better than the other.

The next muscle group we’re going to attack – because it takes a huge portion, it covers a large area of your back – are your traps. When you look at them they’re big ass muscles. They’re the ones over here taking up all this space. They literally start at the base of your head, on the bump here on the back of your head. They come all the way down your spine, they fan out here, they come back in, and they actually have different purposes and different functions depending on the area of that muscle we’re talking about.

So you might have heard people talk about the upper traps, and you have people talking about the lower traps. Well again, look at the direction of the fibers. The fibers of the upper trap are coming down this way. So I always talk about one of the big flaws people make when they train their traps, is to strictly just lift straight up and down. That’s not really training the lats the way that they actually have to be trained.

If you’re taking into respect the orientation of the fibers going down this way, then you actually want to be pulling up and at an angle. So I’ve actually developed the exercise here that I showed you in a previous trap video, that actually does just that. Now, you don’t have to use a band to do this. You could use a lower cable, weighted, heavy, and you can pull at an angle up against that slope and then twist and turn because we’re going to get some of that retraction of the scapula as well. So we’re building into the major functions of the upper trap.

The next thing we’re going to do is then look at the lower trap and these fibers are going to run up in this direction. So what they do is, they actually stabilize down and back and hold your shoulder blades in place, down and back. So we can actually attack them with an exercise like the inverted Y. you take a light set of dumbbells – again, if you’re not used to training these muscles you’re going to have to get used to it because you need to train all of them in order to get your back to show the way it’s supposed to. You want to get your arms up and over your head, keeping your shoulder blades down and back.

Especially as you raise the weight up, it gets more challenging. Your shoulder blades want to fly away. Keep the packed down and back and you’ll hit both the upper and now the lower traps. Next we have another one of those muscles that you probably don’t really think about that much, but if you want to have a complete back and a total back development you’d better start. It’s the terres major.

Look, it’s really close in proximity here to the lats. Guess why. Because they all have the same function as the lats. But there’s one key differentiator that you can do to target this a little bit more effectively. It’s going to be the width of the grip on a lat pull down.

So you saw me do the lat pull down before. I’m going to show it to you again here. You can see my grip here, the width of it is sort of neutral, about shoulder width apart. If you want to start targeting and favoring a little bit more of the terres major then you’re going to widen that grip out, about as far as the bar will go. Perform the exercise the same way, but you can see that you’re getting more activation.

You can actually see that muscle contracting right here underneath that drawing I have. Obviously, it moves underneath the pen, but you can see that area now, contracting a lot more. That’s the quickest and easiest way for you to start building this important area and maybe feel that divot that you have in the back from ignoring it for so long. Next we’re going to talk about three muscles at once. People don’t even know that they’re actually separate muscles a lot of times.

It’s the rotator cuff. We’re talking specifically about the supraspinatus, the infraspinatus, and the terres minor. Again, muscles that you never even think about training when it comes to back when you’re all focus on lats, lats, lats. But again, they’re really important because they actually fill in this space up here in your upper back, above and below the spine of your scapula. That’s where we get the supraspinatus and the infraspinatus.

Obviously, the rotator cuff is a very vulnerable group of muscles that become injured often in people that don’t train right. That’s a lot of us, but we can tell that if we give it some attention, it actually can respond well and also complete that upper back development. Here’s how to do it: you’ve got to externally rotate your arm. If you’re not externally rotating your arm in some exercise then guess what; you are not training these muscles. There’s no other way to train them.

All they do, for the most part, is externally rotate. So they take your arm and they move it outward in the socket. So what we can do is we can take an exercise like a W raise. All these exercises are ones that we actually program in ATHLEANX because I know how important they are and how you need to make sure that you’re focusing on these. The W raise is one of them.

You bend over like you’re going to do a rear delt raise, but from here we’re actually going to rotate the arms backward. I’m actually trying to, as you see me here, move my thumbs back behind my body. I’m