What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today we're going to do the definitive back training workout video for you.
This is why: because I'm breaking out four damned markers for you guys.
As a matter of fact, it's a whole new package of markers to make sure the - Jeff muscle
markers – that you get what we're talking about when it comes to back training.
Look, first and foremost, people don’t give the back the respect it deserves.
Because they can't see it they don’t want to train it.
Those that are training a little bit more seriously, of course you'll train your back,
but as you'll see by the time this video's done, there's a lot more going on in the back
than the lats.
As a matter of fact, you can see, I've got a whole damned road map going on back here
and a lot of ink was used to make sure that we get you to understand that.
So I'm going to break it down muscle by muscle and tell you why you need to do certain things
and what the best exercises are to target those areas so you have a better understanding
the next time you attack your back workout.
Okay, let's start with the lats.
That's probably the one that you're, at least, training.
So what we want to do is look at the anatomy of the lats to better understand what they
do.
They feed into the "X" in our back.
Not just me.
I'm not the only one that has an X implanted in my back.
It's actually something we all should strive for.
What that is, that's the lat, as it feeds down and in, and you'll have the X that kind
of goes like this in your back.
It's the thoracic-lumbar fascia that the lats will feed into.
We'll talk about that muscle in a second.
It feeds into it there, and then they fan up, and around.
So how would you train these?
Well, you want to make sure that you're pulling your arms down and into your sides, and we're
going to do that with exercises like pull ups, or as I'm showing you here, a lat pull
down.
Why is it that you might feel it more, or at least more of a stretch when you're doing
an underhand lat pulldown, as I'm showing you here?
Well, look at the anatomy again.
If I have my arms in front of my body like this, instantly you see that I'm getting more
stretch, more of a lengthening here of the lat as it reaches all the way around the back,
and up around here at the top.
Whereas, if I put my arm to the side here, I've just taken away all that extra stretch.
So you might feel it more by doing an underhand version of this.
Both of them are ultimately going to end down at your side, at peak contraction of the lats,
but you're going to at least have an understanding now, why one may feel better than the other.
The next muscle group we're going to attack – because it takes a huge portion, it covers
a large area of your back – are your traps.
When you look at them they're big ass muscles.
They're the ones over here taking up all this space.
They literally start at the base of your head, on the bump here on the back of your head.
They come all the way down your spine, they fan out here, they come back in, and they
actually have different purposes and different functions depending on the area of that muscle
we're talking about.
So you might have heard people talk about the upper traps, and you have people talking
about the lower traps.
Well again, look at the direction of the fibers.
The fibers of the upper trap are coming down this way.
So I always talk about one of the big flaws people make when they train their traps, is
to strictly just lift straight up and down.
That's not really training the lats the way that they actually have to be trained.
If you're taking into respect the orientation of the fibers going down this way, then you
actually want to be pulling up and at an angle.
So I've actually developed the exercise here that I showed you in a previous trap video,
that actually does just that.
Now, you don’t have to use a band to do this.
You could use a lower cable, weighted, heavy, and you can pull at an angle up against that
slope and then twist and turn because we're going to get some of that retraction of the
scapula as well.
So we're building into the major functions of the upper trap.
The next thing we're going to do is then look at the lower trap and these fibers are going
to run up in this direction.
So what they do is, they actually stabilize down and back and hold your shoulder blades
in place, down and back.
So we can actually attack them with an exercise like the inverted Y. you take a light set
of dumbbells – again, if you're not used to training these muscles you're going to
have to get used to it because you need to train all of them in order to get your back
to show the way it's supposed to.
You want to get your arms up and over your head, keeping your shoulder blades down and
back.
Especially as you raise the weight up, it gets more challenging.
Your shoulder blades want to fly away.
Keep the packed down and back and you'll hit both the upper and now the lower traps.
Next we have another one of those muscles that you probably don't really think about
that much, but if you want to have a complete back and a total back development you'd better
start.
It's the terres major.
Look, it's really close in proximity here to the lats.
Guess why.
Because they all have the same function as the lats.
But there's one key differentiator that you can do to target this a little bit more effectively.
It's going to be the width of the grip on a lat pull down.
So you saw me do the lat pull down before.
I'm going to show it to you again here.
You can see my grip here, the width of it is sort of neutral, about shoulder width apart.
If you want to start targeting and favoring a little bit more of the terres major then
you're going to widen that grip out, about as far as the bar will go.
Perform the exercise the same way, but you can see that you're getting more activation.
You can actually see that muscle contracting right here underneath that drawing I have.
Obviously, it moves underneath the pen, but you can see that area now, contracting a lot
more.
That's the quickest and easiest way for you to start building this important area and
maybe feel that divot that you have in the back from ignoring it for so long.
Next we're going to talk about three muscles at once.
People don’t even know that they're actually separate muscles a lot of times.
It's the rotator cuff.
We're talking specifically about the supraspinatus, the infraspinatus, and the terres minor.
Again, muscles that you never even think about training when it comes to back when you're
all focus on lats, lats, lats.
But again, they're really important because they actually fill in this space up here in
your upper back, above and below the spine of your scapula.
That's where we get the supraspinatus and the infraspinatus.
Obviously, the rotator cuff is a very vulnerable group of muscles that become injured often
in people that don't train right.
That's a lot of us, but we can tell that if we give it some attention, it actually can
respond well and also complete that upper back development.
Here's how to do it: you've got to externally rotate your arm.
If you're not externally rotating your arm in some exercise then guess what; you are
not training these muscles.
There's no other way to train them.
All they do, for the most part, is externally rotate.
So they take your arm and they move it outward in the socket.
So what we can do is we can take an exercise like a W raise.
All these exercises are ones that we actually program in ATHLEANX because I know how important
they are and how you need to make sure that you're focusing on these.
The W raise is one of them.
You bend over like you're going to do a rear delt raise, but from here we're actually going
to rotate the arms backward.
I'm actually trying to, as you see me here, move my thumbs back behind my body.
I'm not just doing this.
I'm doing this and this, externally rotating here at the shoulder so that I'm getting a
little bit of that rhomboid activation – which we're going to talk about next – and also
the external rotation.
So I'm hitting all three of those muscles at once.
So I mentioned the rhomboids.
Let's talk about the rhomboids.
Again, if I look at this side of my body here, you're not going to really see them because
they're buried deeper than the traps.
So the traps are going to cover it all, but if you look at this side of my body over here,
you can see that the rhomboids are right up in here.
Now, the idea is they run up at a little bit of an angle.
So when you're doing your rhomboid exercises like a T, all we're trying to do is pull our
shoulder blades closer together.
They attach on the shoulder blade to the spin.
So when they shorten, all they're going to do is bring the shoulder blade from around
the body, back closer to the spine.
But because of the angle that they run, when we do our Ts, if you come up at a little bit
of an angle, you're actually going to hit them even better.
Again, these are exercises that you have to do.
Rowing will actually work these muscles too, but the idea is, you have to at least attack
them a little bit more directly – sometimes with lighter weights – to get more activation
and better overall development.
Finally, we'll end at the low back.
Again, we're going to talk about some of the top muscles and some of the ones that are
underneath.
The ones we all talk about is the Christmas tree action, right?
We're looking at all the fibers that run this direction here, and we want to know how we
do that.
Well, really, the most important thing, especially for the safety of your low back, are the muscles
that run up and down.
They're basically acting like guide wires that are actually strengthening and stabilizing
your spine.
Well, we can do that with something as simple as a hyperextension.
If the fibers are going straight up and down you can do what I'm showing you here.
You're just going to go from a flexed position to an extended position, or to a neutral position,
and strengthen the muscles that way.
But there's something I think you could do even a little bit better.
I've talked about before how these thoracial lumbar fascia has the lats that feed into
it.
so if they're touching and feeding right into it, as you can see down at the bottom there,
then obviously they're going to have some kind of effect if you could get the lats to
be activated as well.
So we can do that.
We can combine the two.
If you could get into this band, as I show you, now you're going to flex forward.
So the band wants to pull me in this direction.
Now, if I have to resist backward and pull against the band, I'm working those final
erectors – great – but at the same time I can pull my hands out inside the band and
also now engage the lats.
It's going to give you the opportunity to start getting that low back – not just stronger
– but to stand out and look a lot better.
All right, you might be asking "Jeff, is there one exercise – you're usually good at coming
up with exercises – one that I can do that's going to hit every muscle in my back?"
Well, unfortunately, not every single one because there's a lot of muscles going on
back there, as you see.
But there is one move here that will combine a lot of these things together.
That is, you get yourself out of hyperextension again.
You allow your body to fold over in the starting position.
So you're pretty much perpendicular to the ground.
If I'm holding a pair of heavy dumbbells down here at the ground and I lift them straight
up, I'm actually in the frontal plane as I would be with a lat pulldown, but I'm basically
doing an inverted lat pull down.
I'm working the lats, I'm working the terres major, I'm getting those muscles to fire up,
but I'm not even done yet because what I do is, I then return the weights back down, I
come up into a normal hyperextension, I'm now working all those muscles in the low back
that we talked about; all those deeper muscles.
At this point, I now hold at the top, and then I do a row.
I pull the dumbbells up close to my sides and I try to recreate those shoulder blades
together.
So now we're working on some of those mid-scapular muscles.
I'm not necessarily doing all that great of a job at getting the lower traps and not necessarily
doing all that great of a job of getting the upper traps.
We are trying to retract and hold, but we can do things maybe a bit better for that,
but you get the idea.
A lot of things are working at once here.
So if you only have a very short amount of time, this might be the one quick option that
you want to try to do.
So there you have it, guys.
Breaking out the muscle markers to help you to understand, not just how important it is
to train your back, but really how many ways you have to train your back if you want to
get the most out of it.
If you guys are looking to put the science back in strength, I hope these things make
it a lot easier for you to visualize, but it do this every single time we do a workout.
In our ATHLEANX training system I try to break down the science and put it back in strength
so that you understand, not just what to do, but why you're doing it.
Once you do, I guarantee the results come a lot faster.
You can find our ATHLEANX program over at ATHLEANX.com.
In the meantime, if you've found this video helpful, if you want more muscle markers,
of course – I might even break out six, or two backs next time, depending on what
we cover.
Make sure you leave your comments below and I will do my best.
In the meantime, I'll see you back here in just a couple days to cover more of what you
want to see.
See you!