• For lat width, focus on chin ups and pulldowns with a wide grip.
• For lat thickness, focus on rows with free weights such as barbell, T-bar and dumbbell.
• For lower lat exercises keep elbows close to your sides (one arm low cable row)
• For middle and upper back muscles (rhomboids and lower and middle trapezius) use wide grip rows to the chest.
2. Don't Neglect the Lower Back
• Do deadlifts at least every other back workout, as well as lower back isolation exercises (Back extensions, stiff-leg deadlifts and good mornings).
3. Understand Your Grip
• An underhand grip involves the biceps more and may allow you to use more weight.
• Use both underhand and overhand grips.
• To make sure your grip isn’t lost and thus negatively affecting your workout and rep count wear gloves/chalk/training straps.
• Alternatively you can use a staggered grip (one overhand, one underhand) for exercises such as deadlifts.
4. Don't Over Rely on Machines
• Do deadlifts at least every other back workout.
• Do free-weight exercises in each back workout.
• In addition to pulldowns, do chin ups.
5. Don't Overuse Secondary Muscles
• Use a weight you can handle with strict form for 8-12 reps, not relying on momentum to complete your reps.
• Pull with your elbows not your biceps, bringing them back and/or down as far as possible.
• Use overhand grip to minimize biceps work.
• Many exercises involve movement at the elbows and use other muscle groups, such as the biceps. Therefore do back isolation work, such as straight-arm pulldowns toward the end of training.
• If it helps think of your forearms and fingers as hooks that u try not to pull with when doing back exercises, instead using them to grip.
6. Change Your Rep Amounts
Make sure to change your rep count from low to high to medium reps through different workouts to shock your back.
7. Use More Free Weight Exercises
Over the years as more and more machines are introduced for working out your back, people tend to do less free weight exercises. Go back to basics and use mostly free weight exercises such as barbell rows.
8. One Side at a Time
A lot of people focus too much on the weight used when training, causing them to lose focus on actually working the targeted muscles.
One way to reduce the chance of this happening is to use unilateral exercises (one arm row, one arm pulldown, one arm cable row etc). Hopefully this will allow you to remain focused on targeted the correct muscles and maintaining strict form.
By doing the ball exercise immediately after the traditional version (supersetted), the lighter weight now becomes more of a challenge for the chest because those muscle fibers are already fatigued.
9. Try High/Low
This involves doing high rep sets on one exercises then low rep sets on another exercise. For back workouts its best to do high rep (lower weight) sets on machine exercises and focusing on isolating the correct muscle group, followed by low rep (higher weight) sets on free weight exercises.
10. Try Unique Lifts
Using unique lifts is a great way to shock your back, so be sure to mix it up every now and then with varying grips or machines.
Below are a few exercises we recommend:
• High-cable arms-out pulldowns;
• Seated cable high rows with an overhand grip;
• Incline dumbbell rows (Lie face-down on an incline bench and row two dumbbells up);
• One-arm pulldowns
11. Wide-grip Vs. Reverse-grip Pulldowns
Wide grip is best for a wider back (think wings) whilst reverse grip is best for thickness, therefore both should regularly feature in your workouts.
References: J.F. Signorile et al., “A comparative electromyographical investigation of muscle utilization patterns using various hand positions during the lat pull-down,” The journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 16(4), 539-46, 2002.
