The PERFECT Back Workout (2025 EDITION)

With the return of the perfect workout series, I am updating the perfect back workout to give you the best back workout you can do. The biggest difference is that I am giving you not just one, but two perfect back workouts for you to try that are not just randomly thrown together, but are based on s

what’s up guys Jeff Cavalier aex. com do you remember the perfect workouts they became the most popular workout series ever here on YouTube and I have you to thank for that and to show my thanks guess what I’m bringing them back by popular demand the perfect back workout continues our series here today for 2025 and Beyond now when it comes to a perfect workout or in this case A Perfect science-based workout I think it’s important to understand that there is no perfect science so any workout that is actually recommended to you based on the latest in science alone is not really going to cut it see here as we’ve always done we rely on the Sciences of anatomy and physiology and Kinesiology and we put it all together in a workout that actually makes sense and we’re going to do the same thing for you here we’re going to sprinkle in what we know now to be the most effective techniques to employ when we’re trying to build a bigger back but not just for today but for the Long Haul right longevity and joint health is also going to be a big concern of mine as a physical therapist and it’s not just because I’m an anatomy nerd but because we need to know what the muscles do if we want to get the most out of them and when it comes to the back there’s a lot of muscles as a matter of fact there’s some muscles that aren’t even typically part of the back when we talk about back workouts namely the rear delts but you’ll see in this workout that some of the best rear delt exercises in upper back exercises come from some of the heavier performed back exercises not to mention of course we have the old standbys like the lats and I’m going to show you exercises to help to Target them by altering the position of your elbows in space Also the teres major which is a lat Helper but has a very unique way that we can attack it if we use the right exercises and of course we have some of the smaller muscles of the back no less important though and all of them are going to matter we’re going to have to show you how to hit them if we want one workout to be truly perfect now while I say The Perfect Workout what I’m actually talking about is not just one workout but actually two and the reason for that is though we kind of conflict a lot about the latest in science when it comes to training one thing I think we could pretty much agree on at this point is that twice a week frequency for a muscle group is probably better when it comes to building that muscle up than just doing it once a week but the issue is how do we do it well the first thing is you’re going to have to ask yourself how intensely you want to train or you’re willing to train because if you’re going to go balls out then you probably want to make sure that you’re only training that muscle group once a week and I mean high intensity like Mike mener style intensity and if you’re looking for a workout like that we do have our 100 back workout that uses effective reps you’re going to want to check out that being said what if you just want to do kind of a standard workout that a lot of people have access to well that’s where you’re going to want to do these two workouts because here we’re going to equate that volume that we would normally do in one workout and split it up over two the other good thing is while doing this we give ourselves some extra time in other words these workouts can be shorter and because of that we can put another muscle group on the same day and as you’ll see here as we build out this entire Perfect Workout series you’re going to do exactly that with the back workout you’re about to do here pair it up with the bicep workout but we’ll cover this as we break down the series right now we have to talk about those specific back workouts one and two and so with back workout one you’re going to start this workout the way we start all the perfect workouts and that is with a primer because in order to get the most out of whatever muscle you’re going to train you need to get it warmed up and ready to go and for me one of the best ways to do this is with something called a scat pull down primer because if you want to perform better in your back workouts guess what you need to warm up your shoulders because there’s no movement you’re going to do in the gym for your back that doesn’t involve or require a lot of shoulder mobility and looseness so what this does is it warms up the entire shoulder girdle because we get to a lat pull down machine like this we weight it rather lightly because you’ll see we’re doing just one to two sets with 10 to 15 repetitions performed at a very submaximal level but the first part is a scat pull where your elbows will stay locked out and you’re simply trying to pull the bar down one or two inches and what that does is it activates the scapula and we know that the scapula is attached to the shoulder joint VI the acromium and that’s a key point because you want to get normal shoulder biomechanics well you better warm up both the scapula and the shoulder joint itself the second half of this is actually where we warm with the shoulder joint pulling down through one good full range of motion repetition is going to help us to get our shoulders into really good high flexion and all the way back behind our body and some good shoulder extension now if we do these and we get ourselves warmed up then we’re ready to actually start to perform what we need to do and that is the first of our heavy exercises and it’s the seated cable row but this one we’re going to perform with our elbows wide how come because there’s two different focuses we can have when we train our back if we go ni and wide with the elbows we can work more of the upper back muscles if we go narrow with the elbows we can work more of the lats here I actually want you to focus on getting the upper back but also the rear delts because this exercise the CD cable row does a great job of hammering the rear delts and it does it with a load that you’re typically not used to using on some of those really light rear delt exercises and it does a great job of growing them you do two to three sets here of six to eight repetitions until form failure so when this starts to break down and not look the way it supposed to then your sets over just make sure you’re using enough weight here because tension is a driver of hypertrophy and feeling that heavy weight doing the rep slowly is a key way to perform these and get the growth without ruining your joints in the process the next exercise up here is the traditional lat pull down but here I want you to use a narrow grip because again when we narrow up that grip we can get our lats more involved how do you do this one of the recommendations I use is just swap the bar out that you typically use instead of using a wide grip lat pull down bar just put the tricep push down bar on then you have no choice but to narrow up the grip get your elbows out in front of your body and get the lat on greater stretch as you perform every single rep now here I want you to do two to three sets with a weight that would cause failure in the 10 to 12 rep range when I say that I mean actually cause failure in the 10 to 12 rep range not many reps in reserve here because a lot of times we don’t train hard enough as it is if we train to failure we objectively know that we’ve reached failure but we have another way to do that we perform some partial repetitions to ensure that we’ve gotten all the way through failure and what’s nice about this exercise and with a lot of the pulling exercises is those partial repetitions occur at the very top with that stretch position of the lats so you yo