What's up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx.com. We continue our popular band exercise series here.
Today I'm going to show you how to build a bigger back with just bands. See, a lot of times people
think they're screwed when they're training at home and they don't have access to a gym.
But I'm telling you, if you have a couple of these here, you're going to be able to train your back
well. And not just your back, but I mean your whole back. See because there's a lot of
different areas of your back that are important to train. We want to hit the width of your back
with the lats. We want to hit the mid back thickness with the mid traps and Rhomboids,
the upper back thickness with the upper traps. Of course, we want to stabilize and support at all
by strengthening our lower back. Guys let's start breaking them down area by area, exercise
by exercise to give you the best of the best. So, let's start with the lats, because most people
focus on building bigger wider lats. Remember, we could train them two ways, we could go up and
down or we could go horizontal pulling motions front to back. Well, when we talk about up and
down the staple exercise is always going to be the pull up. So, what we can do is we can either
make it easier or harder. If you want to make it easier you put the band around the bar, you
simply step into it like this and this is going to unweight a percentage of your bodyweight. However
much resistance the band provides will assist you with that much and perform the exercise that much
easier. Or you could do this and simply weight up a backpack or throw a bunch of heavy things into
a backpack and anchor the band to it and then step into it and put the band around your neck.
Now you've got a resisted pull up. When it comes to building a bigger back, don't underestimate the
importance of overloading and bands can absolutely provide overload if utilized the right way.
All right. So, sticking with the basics here, guys have got your vertical pulling down. What
about your horizontal pull? Well, if you want to substitute for the Barbell Row, you take the band.
But what most people do wrong is they either grab just one end of the band or they don't provide
enough resistance. And it's easy to do because all you have to do is place it under your feet
and take a nice wide stance. What that does is obviously it increases the tension of the band.
But here's the better part, don't just grab one band, reach down and grab both of them. You can
see what the anchor point dramatically shortened now, the resistance of that band has increased
considerably. Is it a complete replacement for Barbell Row? No. But when all you've
got is a band, it's an incredible way to create overload in that horizontal pulling direction.
So now, while a lot of us will stop right there and focus solely on pulling up and
down vertically or front to back horizontally, the real magic actually happens when you do
something in between--transverse plane pulling. And that's what this exercise does. This is the
high to low Kneeling Banded Row. What this provides us with is an opportunity to take
that band way out in front of our body and then pull it all the way back down and around the back.
One benefit we get here from bands is that we can continue to pull even an extra inch, which
is going to provide an increase in resistance. The other reason why this works so well is because of
those fibers of the back. Realize they don't just run straight up and down or side to side,
they do run in this southwest to northeast direction. That means if you follow the fibers,
like I always tell you to rotation is the key. Some people might have a hard time generating that
peak contraction as you drive your elbow back to the spine unless they have something else going
on and that is the other arm back there waiting for it. Because we can create a more intense back
contraction by doing so. So, I like this for that purpose, it's called the Two for One Row.
You enter the band in a low position and grab on with one arm, you row it back until it's an
isometric contraction. Hold it there the entire time. It's waiting for that other
arm to meet it. How do you do that? You grab the top portion of the band and with that other arm,
you're going to simply drive that arm back again, trying to meet those elbows in the
middle. This is a great variation for building up that mind muscle connection that oftentimes
is missing when it comes to back training. We finish up the first zone here for the lats
with two exercises that will actually allow you to take maybe the biceps out of the movement,
because a lot of times people tend to dominate with biceps and pulling exercises, not so good
when you're trying to build your back. So what we want to do is straight arm exercises that focus
on the abduction function of the lats. This here is the most classic you can have, and it's called
the Straight Arm Push Down. With the band anchored up high in the arms held out straight, your only
goal is to drive those elbows down to your size as tight and as hard as you possibly can. Resist the
tendency to bend the elbows and turn this into a Tricep Push Down. Keep the elbows locked out
and do all the driving through the lats. The second way to accomplish a straight arm
functioning of the lats is with the classic pullover exercise. You might be thinking,
didn't you include this already in the chest edition of the series, Jeff? I did but was
performed very differently. Because instead of having the elbows tight together, I want them
to be flared out. If they're flared out, you're moving the focus towards the last as the main
driver of the movement. Now, it doesn't matter of the elbows get much further than, let's say,
eight or 10 inches from where they start, it's the act of moving them towards abduction, towards your
size that's going to light them up and help you to use this exercise to build bigger lats.
So, if limiting yourself to a single vertical and horizontal exercise wasn't bad enough when you're
trying to build bigger lats, skipping zones all together is a really bad idea if you want to build
a bigger back, especially with bands. But that's where bands come in really, really effectively,
because I'm going to argue this exercise here that targets the second zone is one of the most
effective you could possibly do, and it's really best performed with bands. This is called the
Zeus Row and it hits that Zone 2 middle and lower traps, unbelievably. If you try this, I guarantee
you're going to say this is the best part of this entire video. What you do is you anchor
the band up high and you angle your body forward. And when performed like this with a narrow grip,
it tends to minimize the contribution of the lats with abduction and really, really lights
up those rhomboids and lower traps and mid traps unbelievably, like I said. You have to try this, I
promise you, you're going to love every minute of it. Or maybe hate it, but it's going to work.
So, can I show you something cool, guys, when it comes to bands? It's not just the type of
band you're using, but how you anchor the band that matters. So, if you really want to hit the
mid back, realize that the closer our hands are to each other, the more we're actually going to limit
the ability to pre-stretch that area. Because if I wrap it around something narrow here, my
hands will start and finish in this position. But if I were to take it around something much wider
and take that left over right, right over left the grip, which is going to protract the shoulder
blades, which gives you that good pre-stretch on the mid traps and rhomboids. This exercise will
do just that, it's the Wraparound Row. You can see that by widening my feet out, I create that wider
anchor point. And by doing so, I could take that right over left, left over right grip and apply
that same effectiveness to this exercise. It's a great way to target an area, that once again,
doesn't get hit often enough and bands give you a great opportunity to do it well.
Which brings us to our third zone, and we're going to slide up the traps a little bit now
to focus on those upper traps and that thickness in the upper back. And this here is just a classic
Banded Shrug. And once again, you can see that we can shorten the distance between our hands and the
anchor point. And that's where the tension really, really increases here. Guys, remember, no matter
what band you buy, there's going to be a variation in the amount of tension it could provide. It
might tell you from 60 to 120. When we're talking about maxing out the tension of the band when
you perform it this way. And most importantly, maxing out the tension for the purpose of helping
to actually grow those upper traps of yours where you don't have dumbbells or a barbell.
Now guys, I'd stand on my head if it meant getting you to do Face Pulls, but thankfully,
I don't have to because that's a little dramatic and by now you should know you got into your
face pulls. But what you can do is lay on your back and do this and this is a Lying Face Pull.
And the Lying Face Pulls give you an opportunity to do the same thing, to build up those muscles
of the upper back and also the rotator cuff and scap area, but it gives you a good target.
A lot of times people will struggle with making sure they get their hands back far enough
and what you do here is you just simply drive them down towards the floor as far as you possibly can.
It gives you that end point for making sure that you've gotten that complete contraction of these
key muscles. Hold it for one or two seconds at the bottom of every rep and I promise you,
you're going to fall in love with this version of the Face Pulls, just like I hope
you love every other version of the Face Pull. And finally, that brings us to that all important
but oftentimes neglected forth zone here and that's the low back. And we know that this zone,
when not paid attention to can actually undermine the effectiveness of the exercise in all the
other zones. So, we want to do this and do this well. And one of my favorite ways to do this is
with a band actually and it's the Good Morning, because a lot of times people just simply screw
this exercise up, particularly those people that don't even understand how to perform in the first
place. What you want to do is you want to actually hinge at the hips and not turn this into a simply
a bending over to touch your toes type movement. If you do this right with the band anchored across
the back of your neck, you actually get great engagement of both the glutes and the low back,
working in concert together to fortify it and help you to stay injury free for the long term.
And that brings us to one of my favorite ways to train the low back, and that's actually more of a
multi-zone exercise. We call this one the Superman Press Out. What this does is it actually engages
the entire posterior chain. You anchor the band around your feet and you simply crawl yourself
out into this position. Now, what we do is we lift our whole body up thighs off the ground,
just off the ground to activate the low back in the glutes. But we travel all the way up that
posterior chain by engaging those lower traps, by reaching our arms up overhead at the same time.
This is going to be one of your favorite exercises to do if you never did it before.
As a matter of fact, it might actually trick you into performing the low back exercise
because you have so much damn fun doing it. So, they have it, guys no gains to be lost
because you're training with bands. If you want to continue to build your back up, you've got
the right exercises now to get the job done. If you're looking for others in this series, guys,
make sure you check out the Chest Edition and the Shoulders Edition, which I'll link for you at the
end of the video. And if you're looking for step by step plans, guys, we have them all laid out for
you over at athleanx.com. Leave a comment below and let me know what you want to see next in the
series. And if you haven't done so, make sure you click subscribe and turn on your notifications,
so you never miss a new video when we put one out. All right guys see you soon.