JEFF: Jesse! Where you been, my man?! It’s been like a week. I haven’t seen you.
JESSE: Oh, you know, man. Just coming up with some new exercises.
JEFF: That’s not a new exercise. That’s a lat pulldown.
JESSE: That’s not a lat pulldown. That’s a Romanian pulldown.
JEFF: A what?
JESSE: A Romanian pull down. All right, so it’s really great because you take your
femur, right?
JEFF: That’s your humerus.
JESSE: And you get up, and internally rotate-
JEFF: External rotation, yeah.
JESSE: And you can really abduct your elbows deep into your sides-
JEFF: You mean ‘adduct’ them, right?
JESSE: And then on the way up, on the concentric, you really, really slow it down.
JEFF: Yeah, the real – eccentric, right.
JESSE: Yeah, so it’s great because it works your lats, it works your hamstrings, and your
quads.
JEFF: You’re a f***ing idiot.
JESSE: Do I do anything useful?!
JEFF: No!
JESSE: Well, do you at least like my hair?
What's up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
It’s time to start rocking on those pulldowns. And no, I didn’t lose my mind. I’m not
talking about this kind of rocking. You see, this only gets you into an exercise fails
video. Maybe not somebody else is, it’s certainly going to get into mine.
If you haven’t seen it, you can actually watch that video here at the end of this one.
It’s worth the couple minutes to see. what I’m talking about is starting to rock on
your pulldowns like this.
You see, this actually has a lot of benefits and as an advocate for doing the many, many
types of pulldowns, this is one that needs to fit into your regime because it’s going
to provide benefits that you’re not feeling right now. you see, when it comes to the lat
pulldown, guys, this exercise is one of the best ways to train your lats because it allows
for the versatility of a lot of different hand grips, a lot of different bars that you
can use, and a lot of different placements on the bar to hit different areas of your
back.
The limitation comes if we don’t understand the anatomy of the lats, and what we’re
actually trying to accomplish. So if you look at the lat muscle itself, you can see that
it has a pretty big sweep, and most importantly, it attaches to your arm.
It’s not just on your back. So if our arm comes in front of our body, we’re going
to get more of a stretch on the lat itself.
That’s a good thing to know because it makes a big difference when we’re talking about
whether we want to use an underhand grip – which will take our arms out, in front of our body,
and provide that stretch – or whether we want to use an overhand grip, which limits
that on every, single rep.
But you might be thinking “Well, that means you’re just going to go to the underhand
grip.” No, because if you were to just do an underhand grip and perform your lat pulldowns
vertically, as you see me doing here, then you can see that you’re actually limiting
the amount of extension – meaning your arm’s going back, behind your body – by being
in that position.
That’s not what we want, if we want to train the lats. We want to have extension. We want
the arms to get back, behind the body. So we’re limiting that. what we normally do
when we perform the underhand version is we start to lean back, to allow that to happen.
But what happens there? when we lean back on the underhand pulldown, now we start to
involve a lot of the other muscles in the back, as you see happening here. Anything
that we can do to squeeze our shoulder blades together is going to start involving multiple
muscle groups, and limiting the isolation on the lats themselves.
So your other option is, you go back to the vertically pulling, arms in front, hand over
hand, lat pulldown. Now here, you can see that we can hit the lats in that adduction
range that we didn’t get from the underhand pulldown because they’re already close to
our body here.
The overhand allows us to pull down and go into this abducted, into adducted. Abducted,
into adducted position, against our body. That’s good, but what are we missing here?
We’re not getting the extension.
This is where some people make the mistake of leaning back on this overhand lat pulldown
to get the arms back, behind the body. But the elbow position is always going to be too
high by doing this, and you can see this is immediately shifting the focus.
Not to the lats, but the rear delt. So where are we left? We’re left with the opportunity
to stat doing the rocking pulldown. On the rocking pulldown, guys, what you’re allowing
yourself to do is do a vertical pull to get the benefits of the overhand, straight up,
and straight down adduction going on from that vertical lat pulldown.
And then add the additional extension. The all-important key extension at the very end,
by stopping the bar at about forehead height, and then driving down one elbow to take over
the rest of the load. The elbow comes down, continues to come down, but it rides back,
behind your body.
You’ll immediately feel the difference here. Now, why is this important? Because you want
to train your lats in as many key functions as they have. If your lats can extend, you
want to extend. If your lats can adduct, you want to adduct. If your lats can extend and
adduct, as you can see here, then you want to do both.
Now I will caution you. Do not just grab the bar here with arms straight and pull down
on one side. This is not a hard exercise. This is actually very easy. You’re not really
moving. They’re just placing the stack very far, and what you’re doing is you’re turning
this into an elbow flexion exercise.
You want to engage, and bring the elbows down so both sides are bearing that load into adduction,
and then from there, you finish it down with the tilt. It will be a much different feel
for when you do this exercise. So there you have it, guys. Sometimes a little anatomy
goes a long way.
When you can use it to your advantage to make exercises better then I think we’ve gotten
what we were shooting for in the first place. That is, better training. Guys, if you’re
looking for a complete training program, head to ATHLEANX.com.
We put the science back in every, single workout we do because, as you can see, it all matters.
And don’t just take my word for it, guys. Put me to the test. Try this exercise, do
it without, then do it with this tweak, and I promise you, you’re going to feel more.
All right, guys. I’ll be back here again soon, in just a few days. Let me know what
you want me to cover and I’ll do my best to do that for you in the days, and weeks
ahead.
All right, see you soon.