How to do Lat Pulldowns (AVOID MISTAKES!)
Do you know how to do lat pulldowns with proper form? In this video, I am going to show you exactly how to perform a pulldown so that you can perform this effective exercise every time without making a single mistake. Remember, it’s not just what movement pattern you do, but how you do them that mat
The Lat Pull Down, possibly one of the best back exercises you can do. It’s also one of the most scalable, but you got to do it right. Today, I’m going to show you how to do it, whether you’re a beginner or advanced to get the most out of every single repetition. And before you even grab a bar, it actually starts down here at the pad and setting up the right height. Because this pad actually creates the leverage that you need to give you that counterbalance to pull that extra weight down.
As a matter of fact, if you don’t have this set up, try to lift more than 75% of your body weight. Go ahead, I dare you. So how high should it be? Well, it can’t be high enough that you have enough room to move your knees up and down. What you want is to be in contact with your knees, but enough room to have some heel lift off the ground.
Because that heel lift is going to give you some give as the bar goes back up to the top on every rep. Without that give If it’s down too far and your foot is flat, you don’t have the ability to extend into a deeper eccentric and you’re going to want that. Now, when it comes to your grip, it’s actually going to be determined a lot by the type of bar you use. If you use a V handle like this, of course you’re going to be forced into a more narrow grip. If you use a neutral bar like this, you’re going to be having a wider grip.
That being said, most of you are gonna be doing it with a straight bar just like this. So how wide do you want to go? You can find it by actually stepping yourself up to the bar and lining up your elbow underneath your wrist. Once you find that angle, that’s going to be your best natural pulling angle to be at. That’s usually going to happen right around the turn of the bar for most of us.
If you go any narrower than that, you’re going to start to force more of the work to be done by the forearms and the muscles in the forearm. If you force your grip wider than that, you’re going to take the focus a little bit more away from the lats and put it more onto a muscle called the teres major. It’s a lat helper, but again, it’s a latch you’re trying to build, so go for that perfect angle right here in line with the elbow and wrist. So, now that your pad set and your grip right, where do you go from here? Well, we got to talk about our torso angle because this is where people screw it up.
Are you supposed to be leaning back or are you supposed to be upright? Well, it depends on what you’re trying to hit. If you’re trying to hit your lats, then you’re going to want to be as upright as you possibly can be. Because remember, this is sort of a substitution for the Pullup that was too heavy for you to do, right? You’re unweighting a portion of your bodyweight with this exercise.
If you want to shift the focus to your upper back, you’re going to be allowed to lean back more, so you pull the bar back more at an angle. If you’re thinking more lats, then think about front pockets. In other words, try to tuck your elbows into your front pockets this way. And by doing that I’m actually flaring my lats but pulling more in that vertical direction. If I want to get more of that upper back or mid back, then think about elbows pulling back.
They’re going to wind up flaring out a little bit, but that’s fine because you want to get that elbow back behind the body if you want to optimize those middle scap upper back pulling muscles, even the rear delts. But it’s not enough to know what angle to pull at, you also want to know where you’re pulling to. And the good news is it’s going to be the same point whether you’re leaning back or doing it more upright, and that is to your upper chest. If you’re going to do this to hit your lats, guys, you’re not going to want to lean back to open up the upper chest. You’re going to want to open up the upper chest as you pull down.
In other words, don’t just bring the bar down towards you and sink in, remember to attack that bar with your upper chest, lift your sternum up as you pull down. That will effectively hit those lats again, getting those elbows tucked in front of your body. If you’re trying to hit more of that upper back, then what you’re going to do is just do that lean back but still target that upper chest. The reason why we do this is because opening up the rib cage is going to allow the elbows to travel back behind the body more easily and to engage those back muscles a lot more effectively. So, now you follow the steps, and you got the bar to where it should be here on your chest, so you think you’re good, right?
Well, you’re only half good because the other half of the exercise is going to dictate how effective the exercise is. Because this might be the most effective part of the exercise, and that is the return of the bar to the top. Because the eccentric portion of this lift is going to apply that stretch to the lats if you’ve done everything else right. That’s going to key some new muscle growth. But it all starts back here having your knees anchored properly again under the pad.
Because if you start to use momentum or if your body is not anchored properly and you start to follow the bar back up, you’re not creating the separation that you need between the origin and insertion of the lats to create that stretch, you’re just allowing the hips to follow it. You got to make sure you keep those two points as far apart as possible. Hips stay down, arm travels up and as you get that stretch, go nice and slow because the slower you go here, the more tension you apply, the better gains you’re going to see. Now, if you’re more advanced and want to squeeze a little bit more out of the exercise, you can do that too and there’s two ways to do it. The first thing I’d like you to do is just pause in that fully stretched position.
We know from the recent work of Brad Schoenfeld that applied tension in the stretch position is a good key stimulator for muscle growth. So, at the end of the rep, I talked about how important the eccentric is hang out there for one or two seconds and a pause style and then go back down into your next repetition. The next thing you can do is work your way to partial repetitions and I mean to, in other words, perform all of your repetitions through full range of motion until you feel like you can’t get another full range rep. But don’t stop just there because the intensity can go higher and higher by performing whatever your lats will allow you to at this point. Meaning small little partials, even a half a rep or a quarter rep, even an eighth of a rep.
Whatever you can do to get a little bit more range of motion without it becoming strictly based on momentum, that’s going to deliver more tension into that muscle, especially at that point of fatigue to help to push it to new potential for growth. And just like that, you’ve got the perfect Lat Pulldown. If you guys are looking for more of how to do certain exercises, make sure you watch how to do a Hanging Leg Raise. It can be tricky if you don’t know what you’re doing. Also, if you’re looking for a full program, guys, we have them over at athleanx.
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