If you want a bigger back, do this

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:43 Erector spinae

01:03 Traps

02:35 Rear delts

05:32 Latissimus dorsi

13:32 Teres major

14:26 Outro

Transcript:

Does your back training program consist of a combination of rows and pull downs, or even worse, vertical and horizontal pulls, maybe with some dumbbell reverse fly sprinkled on top? Then it’s a good thing you’re watching this video because I’m here to unf*ck your program.

Optimal back training requires more nuance than just doing a bunch of horizontal and vertical pulling. As my grandfather used to say: “If you want your back to be wide is a barn door that ain’t going to cut it, brother.” He didn’t actually say that and he didn’t have that accent, but he was right. First, you have to distinguish between the different back muscles. Just training back is like taking a taxi and saying you’re going to Europe.

Starting from the bottom we have the Erector Spinae. Those you typically don’t train with most back exercises, you train them mostly with squats, deadlifts, and then maybe some dedicated Erector Spinae work like supermans or spinal extension work, if you’re into that. So I’m not going to go into detail here on the Erector Spinae, I’m going to focus on the muscles typically associated with the upper body.

Moving up through the middle, we have the traps, and you should separate between the lower, the middle and the upper traps because they have different functions. The upper traps I recently made a video on. So you can check that out. As a quick recap, if you’re doing vertical and horizontal pulls, what you really want in there is the wide shrug variation. For the middle traps you want scapular retraction. That will be done pretty well by any type of horizontal pulling exercise, typically, like rows. What you really want to do for those, though, if you want to maximally engage the traps, is to get full range of motion and really get that nice stretch in the lengthened position. Many people are taught by physios that honestly just don’t have a clue that you should keep the back perfectly straight and don’t let your shoulder blades come forward because it’s dangerous or something.

Look, nobody has ever gotten injured letting their shoulder blades roll forward during a row. I also bio-mechanically don’t see anything wrong with that. It is perfectly safe and it is good for the traps. You want them to reach high tension in a lengthened position. You also train the lower traps that way, but for the lower traps you probably also want some scapular depression, which means the shoulder blades are going down, the opposite of a shrugging movement, and that you get from vertical pulls. Again, you want your shoulder blades to come all the way up, at the top of the movement really get that nice stretch. If you do those things and really get full range of motion with your pulling exercises, then the middle and the lower traps are worked quite well by those exercises, and whether you need some isolation work on top of that is highly questionable. So if you add some wide shrugs for the upper traps then the traps are pretty much covered in your training program.

Moving outward to the side, we have the rear delts, the posterior deltoids. And here we can really see the suboptimality creep in. Just doing vertical and horizontal rows generally isn’t going to cut it for optimum rear delt development. And that might be a reason we see so many people with underdeveloped rear delts. The problem with vertical and horizontal pulls for the delts; rows, pretty much any of the popular compound exercises that people do for their back is that they don’t put tension on the delts in their stretched position. At the end of a row, cable row or machine row, or at the end even of a pull down the angle of force is directly in line with your arms so it’s the traps that are still producing tension, but the rear delts are no longer producing any tension, or at least not more than stabilizers.

The rear delts produce horizontal abduction and shoulder extension. That means they pull your elbows back. They pull your elbows back at your sides, which is shoulder extension, and they pull your elbows back horizontally and like a reverse fly type movement, which is horizontal abduction. There’s no demand for that in the end position of a row or a pull down when your arms are straight. And over the past years we have seen multiple studies showing that muscles typically grow more when they are trained in more lengthened positions. None of those studies are for the back. So you might argue, well, will they really apply? I think probably they will. We have seen research support this trend for the biceps, the triceps depending on how you interpret the study, the calves, the quads, the glutes and the hamstrings. Oh, and also the pecs. So literally all the studied muscles so far have responded to the same criterion and probably it is because there is some fundamental physiological mechanism like passive mechanical tension that drives the extra muscle growth.

We also see that you can achieve high levels of muscle activity, and there can be high levels of metabolic stress in lengthens positions. Regardless of what the precise mechanism is, which remains to be elucidated, the fact is that all studies that have tested this in different muscles have found the same trend that muscles grow more when they are trained in lengthened positions than they are trained in shortened positions. And for the rear delts specifically, based on their sarcomere operating lengths, which is the closest evidence we have on their exact length-tension relationship, they actually appear to produce the highest levels of tension in lengthened positions. So even if you don’t put any stock in the whole stretch-mediated hypertrophy thing and lengthened bias training, the rear delts still should be trained with exercises that produce high tension in the lengthened position because they will also likely produce very high levels of active tension in those positions. And there’s regional hypertrophy that takes place in most muscles that are more complicated. The delts definitely are one of those. So it’s likely that simply neglecting any part of the range of motion that the muscles are capable of, not training that with exercise that stimulates that region or that part of the movement very well will neglect some of the muscle fibers to at least some degree. How do you achieve this? You can do it with cable reverse flys, not dumbbell reverse flys because, again, then you have maximum tension in the top position, which is the shortened position. If you are using dumbbells you want something like a side lying reverse fly.

Moving on, we have the Latissimus dorsi, commonly referred to as the lats. But because I spent 6 years studying Latin in my childhood and I’ve been waiting all my life for this one very moment to make use of that knowledge, I can tell you that “latissimus” means widest and “dorsi” refers to the back. So the lats actually refer to the widest muscle of the back. How cool is that? So how do we train the widest muscle of the back and make it even wider? Well, not just with vertical and horizontal pulls, because again, we have the problem that in the top position of the movement or the most lengthened position, the stretched position, there’s no tension on the lats. Just like with the rear delts, at the top position of a pull down or a pull up, when you get that full stretch, the lats actually are not producing active muscle tension.

Rows are particularly suboptimal for the lats because not only do you have no tension in the stretched position, the stretched position isn’t very stretched to begin with. The elbow doesn’t go up beyond shoulder height, so you are not getting much of a stretch anyway in the lats. Moreover, when you pull the elbow back and you pull the elbow beyond the body into hyperextension, the lats at that point lose leverage. The lats are no longer contributing to that part of the movement. That’s also a big part of the reason why you’re so much weaker. When you’re doing rows, and you’re really going for full range of motion trying to hit your chest with the implement or dumbbell or whatever you’re using, when the elbow goes behind the body you’ll notice you become much weaker. It’s because the lats lose their leverage.

Muscles pull the origin and the insertion together. In the case when the elbow is behind the body, the last actually reverse movement, they pull the upper arm back towards the center. So that’s why in a bench press, the lats in the bottom position actually aid a little bit in pushing up the weight. During a row that means the lats are no longer involved. It would actually be somewhat counterproductive to engage the lats fully in that position, because they would help pull the elbow back towards center line, and that would essentially constitute a push. So yes, in that sense, the lats technically are a little bit of a pushing muscle as well. So what do you want?

You want an exercise like Lat prayers for the lats. And I’m happy to see that, since some ten years ago I gave the exercise a name and explained why it’s so good, it has become a lot more popular. The big benefit of Lat prayers is that you get very high tension throughout the entire range of motion, as I explained in the following clip:

So this exercise gives you nice constant tension on the lats throughout their full muscle length. So you see, he bends forward. You get a nice stretch, like here, now you have a good muscle stretch. And now you get a nice peak contraction. Full stretch, peak contraction, full stretch… If you do like only a normal pullover, then you only get one or the other. Because if you stay standing upright, if you stay standing upright like this you don’t have that good stretch. In a lot of programs for the lats they neglect stretch mediated hypertrophy. So if you think, you know, deadlifts, rows, they don’t train the lats in the position of… …at long muscle lengths. So you don’t train them… You don’t put them on a high tension in a stretched position and you don’t get much stretch mediated hypertrophy, so leaves a lot of gains on the table.

Some key technique points, because a lot of people mess this up. You want your arms to remain either perfectly straight, which I think is the safest and most rigorous way to do them, or you want your arms to stay at a consistent level of bending. It’s fine to have your arms bent a little bit, but then you don’t want them to bend more. If you do that, many people start turning it into a pulling exercise, and that’s not the goal of the exercise. You want to really emphasize the lats and you’ll also feel it in your triceps. Generally, that is fine. It’s actually a big benefit of the exercise that you also train the long head of the triceps. It is a shoulder extensor and it compensates for all the volume you get for the other heads of the triceps. Typically, people undertrain the long heads of their triceps and they overtrain the medial and the lateral heads, as I explained in this video.

Lat prayers are distinct from standard pullovers by their body movement. You’re supposed to lean into the movement to really get a nice stretch in the stretched position. So you lean forward as you go into the stretch position, and then you lean a bit backward to get full contraction. That way you can use your body position to get very high mechanical tension on the muscle fibers throughout the entire range of motion. When the exercise is too easy at the top you need to lean forward more. If it’s too difficult at the top you lean back a little bit. This way you can maximize, just like with an ISO kinetic machine, but without the need for such a machine, mechanical tension throughout, again, the entire range of motion. You could also do pullovers instead of Lat prayers. Lat prayers have two distinct advantages over pullovers. First, with pullovers, you actually don’t get the same level of stretch. It seems nice that you get even more emphasis on the lengthened position, but because the scapulae are pinned against the bench when you are doing a dumbbell or a barbell pullover, you actually don’t get the same level of stretch in the lats.

Remember that lats span from the back, part of the pelvis, part of the spine, and a little bit of the scapula to the upper arm on the humerus. So if you move the upper arm further upward or further away from the spine, basically, you get a bigger stretch. Moving the scapulae, your shoulder blades, achieves that purpose. So you don’t get a lat stretch just because of the shoulder extension movement or the shoulder flexion movement, you get a bigger last stretch as well when you move the scapulae. When you let the scapula drift all the way upward, or at the end of a row when you let it come forward and let your shoulder blades roll forward as much as they come, that actually increases the stretch on the lats. You cannot do that as well with a dumbbell or a barbell because your scapula are fixed in place, they are pinned against the bench. Same benefit that pushups have over the barbell bench press. The scapulae are free to move. Also tends to be a bit easier on the shoulders for a lot of people.

The second benefit is that while pullovers seem like they are great at emphasizing the lengthened position, because you have peak tension there, in fact, the only part of the movement where the dumbbell or the barbell is as horizontal as they get, you get high tension in that position, you can also achieve that where Lat prayers by just leaning forward more. So you actually don’t have a benefit, you’re just omitting the first half of the movement. Based on the latest studies showing that training purely with lengthened partials does not outperform training with a full range of motion in trained individuals, plus the fact that lats actually have the highest potential for tension, based on their length-tension relationship, when the elbow is at the side I think you should not omit the first part of the movement. With a pullover you’re only doing the stretched part of the movement. With a Lat prayer you’re also going all the way down and when the elbow, again, is at your side that’s when the lats actually achieve the highest active tension. Whether the passive tension or whatever the mechanism is for stretch mediated hypertrophy or lengthened bias training, whether that compensates for that somewhat remains to be determined, but I don’t think there is a good reason to skip it when you can essentially get that free volume and still get very high active tension.

Moreover, for a lot of people, it’s a bit easier on the shoulders when you’re not just emphasizing the lengthened position because for some people the shoulder is in a bit of a precarious position when you’re maximally loading it at the end range of motion. So I think Lat prayers should be an absolute staple in your back training arsenal. However, they are not the only exercise you want. The lats typically achieve the highest levels of muscle activity, at least based on EMG research during shoulder extension and, biomechanically speaking, that does seem to be their primary purpose, but you also want to have some adduction exercises which you get with wider grip lat pull downs. It’s a slightly different function, and there is evidence for functional differentiation within the lats. The upper fibers seem to be more involved with shoulder extension, like a Lat prayer, and the lower, more horizontal fibers have better leverage and therefore seem to be more involved with more wide grip pull down exercises or pull ups. I don’t think you should go super wide though. For one, for some people it causes shoulder problems. It also reduces the range of motion and the stretch you get in the top position if you go super wide and it just feels very awkward and it can reduce the biceps activity, although that effect is actually a bit overrated, as I explained in this video. But all in all, multiple good reasons not to go with a wide grip and also not to go with a behind the neck grip because research shows that the muscle activity is no greater with behind the neck, and for some people it causes shoulder problems. If it’s fine with your shoulders you can do it, but I don’t see the benefits. So the risk reward, in my view, is not positive.

On a final note about the lats, we also have the Teres major muscle, which is actually quite significant, but because it shares complete functionality with the lats, if you are optimizing your Lat training program, it will also optimize the training for the Teres major muscle. So all in all, for the lats and the Teres major, what I recommend is Lat prayers should be a staple of your training program. Rows are not an exercise I typically like to do for the lats. I like to do more high row type exercises to focus on the traps and the rear delts, rather than use rows for the lats. If you do use a row variant then try to lean forward a lot to make it more of a diagonal pull and try to let the shoulder blades also come forward. Unilateral exercises are great for that purpose because you can really let the shoulder drift forward a lot and therefore get a nice stretch in the lats. So those type of exercises I like. Pull downs., I like a little bit of a wider grip, not super wide, also great. And I think that combination is really effective overall for the lats.

I hope this helps you train your back more efficiently by knowing which individual muscles you’re actually targeting and which exercises are best to achieve that specific purpose, rather than just trying to mix it all together and try to train your “back” with an exercise. It should be more targeted, more optimal, and therefore you should get better gains. If you like this type of evidence based content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.