STOP, You’re Training Your Back Wrong!

Are you training your back wrong? You are about to find out in this video on how to get a bigger back by implementing these back workout strategies that may be completely new to you. We look to anatomy and science to give us clues as to how we may want to switch up the way we do our back exercises i

when it comes to back development there’s six things that you can do right away that are going to have an immediate impact on your size strength and muscularity of your back and it starts right here at the pull-up bar I get it it’s one of the hardest exercises you could do and I’m about to make it just a little bit harder but way more rewarding you see because a lot of us Focus so much on trying to get ourselves up over the bar when I really want you to focus on what you’re doing down here cuz a lot of us stop right about here rather than going down to a full stretch and I understand why because initiating the next rep from that slightly bent position seems to make it so much easier to do but I promise you easy is not the path to better back development making it more difficult will be so going all the way down is key getting yourselves down though is different than going completely unpacked and allowing your biceps to almost touch your ears you can still have a degree of packing of the shoulders by just pulling your shoulder blades down but I want those arms to be straight before you initiate the next repetition because every dead hang pull-up that you do allows you to get into that fully stretched lap position that’s a much better stimulator for growth and it’s not just here would happen the same thing on a squat we know that staying one or two inches above parallel is vastly different than going to parallel or below in terms of the amount of weight you can use well the same thing happens here I don’t care how many repetitions you do if you do them in this way the Reps will go down but the results will go up and that concept doesn’t have to just apply to pull-ups as a matter of fact another staple back exercise the lat pull down could benefit from the same advice making sure that you’re getting that full extension up the top is going to give you that better stretch that will help you to build a better back but it doesn’t just stop there see a lot of times I think an opportunity missed is to actually take away the bar that you’re used to using in place of one maybe they don’t use for this exercise a tricep push down bar because what this does is it forces us to go a lot narrower in terms of our grip which holds a lot of additional benefits when you do your pull Downs this way your elbows immediately start to get in front of your body more which will allow us to get a better stretch on the lats as we get up towards the top and into that fully extended arm position and again without the option of a y bar I just don’t have anywhere else to grab here in other words I’m limited to the grip width and it’s putting me right where I need to be because I’m using this bar but what if I didn’t have this bar how narrow should I go well it’s actually easy to determine cuz if I held this up right here you can see that my mid placement hand grip on this would be right about the knurling the middle finger being around the knurling of the traditional lat pull down bar either way you can’t be over reliant on The Wider grip positions because they have a tendency to do more development for the Terry’s major if you want to get more of that stretch benefit here like I talked about narrow up that grip and you’ll see better gains speaking of the lat pull down have you ever given any consideration to where you do the exercise in other words instead of just doing the typical three sets of 10 as Maybe your second exercise and your back workout what about mixing it up a little bit and doing it after this exercise you see if you haven’t considered this you’re not only missing a golden opportunity but you’re probably making like vensor roll over in his grave because he used the straight arm push down or the dumbbell lap pullover as the perfect pre-exhaust exercise for a more compound underhand variation of the lat pull down so what I’m talking about is if you do a straight arm push down here you’re getting a lot of that add ction Focus that is the responsibility of the lats getting those elbows to drive down and close to your sides and if you do the exercise right you can fatigue out the lats to a really big degree here on just that one pre-exhaust exercise but what would I do from here well i’ actually run my ass over with very little rest to the pull down machine but this time not only is it close grip but it’s underhand and when we go to the underhand grip here we have another thing working for us and that is the biceps will help us now to push those lats to and through failure that we just went on the first exercise so with the biceps being able to kick in and the lat’s already pref fatigued I can keep going further and through that typical point where my lats would have already given up right the biceps can now assist the lats to keep going for maybe that one or two additional growth producing reps that’s actually causing you right now so it’s not just about the exercises that you pick but a lot of it has to do with the sequence of the exercises you pick and sometimes how you pair up to the exercises that you pick it all matters guys you mind if I interject here a little bit I mean just talking about mistakes for back training and I made some pretty big mistakes I mean hell this is what I look like but this is what I look like now and if you want to know how I did it it’s with this exercise right here and it’s a very simple one and I know Jeff’s talked about it about a million times but I’m going to talk about it just once for you and it’s the face pull now this exercise was huge for me in my back development not only for you know deadlifting and and also my Aesthetics but it also kept me healthy and in the gym and training more consistently and there’s two things that I did with this exercise that led to all that development one it was consistency and I was doing it every single day just like Jeff told me to do and I did it after every single workout no matter what secondly I did it right because too often we see people do face TOS like this until Jeff showed me how to do it properly with keeping my hands and elbows at the right angle 90° every time I did a rep this was huge for me and made an immediate difference the second that I tried it and I know it’s going to make a huge difference for you too the second that you try it so the next opportunity here is on a classic barell row and you should be doing the exercise except you need to have the right discipline when you do the exercise cuz how often is it that either when you’re doing it or when you want someone else do it that over time when they start with a pretty good bent over position they start to just stand more and more upright and more and more upright until it looks more like an upright row rather than an actual barbell row or the other thing is we actually start to bring our chest to the bar to try to visually cheat the idea that we’re actually getting that bar to our chest rather than using the muscles to do the work right momentum isn’t a muscle so what can we do instead I’m encouraging you to do chest supported rows and what this does is it eliminates that momentum right off the bat and it also fixes that back at that proper angle from the beginning to the end eliminating that that rise that you do as I just showed you but it also does a couple other things if you have any low back pain at all and you had a hard time barbell rowing in space you really want to be able to do this because it supports that there is no stress on the low back in this exercise furthermore you can actually get a little bit of extended reach of the dumbbells that you really can’t safely with a b