Hey, what's up guys. Welcome back to the channel.
So the last video I did talking about how to get more upper chest activation
actually went really well.
And I could tell from the comment section that a lot of you took away a lot from
that video,
whether it was how to increase the overall mind muscle connection to that area,
or just fixing your form cues when doing the incline bench press.
And so I want to take that,
take that idea and bring it to the next muscle group, which is going to be back.
Obviously back guys is super important,
even if you're actually in trying to increase your bench press,
you're going to have a really hard time doing that.
If your foundation isn't set in that foundation, believe it or not is your back.
Now, when it comes to doing a back workout, guys,
it needs to be balanced. Okay. And because of this,
we're going to go over methods for vertical pulling and horizontal pulling.
Granted, obviously whether you do a vertical pull or horizontal pull,
you're still working your back.
It's just that they focus slightly on different areas,
which when put together makes it a more well-balanced workout. For example,
when you're doing like a pull up or a lat pull down, you're hitting your lats,
okay. But you're still hitting them more like mid like Mid lats and hitting your
major, pretty hard as well too.
And when I did my 100 reps a day challenge,
without even realizing it, I was hitting my pull-ups every single day,
but I wasn't really doing my horizontal pulls of my bent over row and my
T-bar rows. And by the end of the 30 days, then after about a week,
when I took time off, my lower back,
got really tight and I had to have my massage therapist come in and he
basically said, well, you should have been doing your horizontal poles.
You basically created a slight imbalance. And now those muscles,
because they weren't being trained as hard,
they got kind of tight and it was causing my back to hurt.
Like it felt like it always had the crack. And so, I mean,
it was a really easy fix.
He loosened me up and I started doing my horizontal pulls and we were good.
Okay. But they do work different areas of the back.
Now what the problem is is,
and this is going to relate to both exercises when you're doing a vertical pull,
but it really doesn't matter what you're doing.
If you're doing a pull up doing a lat, pull down. If you're doing a weighted,
pull up doing an assisted pull up, okay. It doesn't matter what you're doing.
Those same principles still hold true.
You need to get a stretch in your lats and do full range of motion to
work them correctly. Half reps, guys, don't keep tension in the area.
Now I can understand maybe trying to go over versus intensity,
or you want to do like get a sick pump or something.
And then you might do a half rep and a half rep. You know,
it looks like this where you're kind of doing one of these, right.
And we see it all the time in the gym. And it's usually done for two reasons.
Number one,
because they read somewhere that it keeps intensity the intensity higher.
Cause you're keeping more tension in the muscle or number two,
just don't know what you're doing. Actually.
There's a third reason you're trying to do it,
weight it with a lot of weight that you can't handle.
So it reduces you to doing half the range of motion at the end of the day,
full range of motion, always gives you the most bang for your buck. Okay?
Because remember you get the most muscle breakdown in the negative as well as
the stretch. So if, when you're doing pull ups or lat pull downs,
you have a hard time feeling it in your lats. Or maybe you're,
you're not doing quite half reps, right?
But maybe you're just not locking out the bottom.
What I want you guys to do before you start your pull ups is I want you to hang
like this and I want you to almost let your body go dead. Okay?
And then once your body is like a dead weight, you're going to start to feel a,
huge stretch in your lats.
And when I was doing my 100 reps a day challenge every single day before I would
start, I would come up here. I would hang just like this.
They were actually kinda rock back and forth and I would get my lats to
really stretch by doing this.
And that would activate my lats and kind of get my mind muscle connection a bit
stronger before I'd start doing my working sets. Now,
for those of you who maybe don't have the strength to hang like this and rock
back and forth and feel that stretch in your lats, you have a few other options.
You can use a band as well. Okay? Just put your wrist in here like this.
Or you can use a cable machine and it's the same motion,
but I'm going to show on the cable machine because chances are at your gym.
You definitely have one of these. If you're going to a gym,
not every gym has resistance bands just lying around,
but you're gonna get on the ground like this. Okay.
And you're going to safely kind of walk yourself out to the side,
keep your arm and your side like this. And you're just gonna lean in
as you lean in
You're going to feel a huge stretch. All through your lats. Okay.
Make sure you're pushing your arm back. If your arms in front of you like this,
it's not going to work as well. Push it through and lean.
And I'm only using like 30 pounds here
guys I'm not trying to rip my arm in half rip my lats off my spine. Okay.
I'm just trying to lean into it. Feel that stretch, hold it for like 10,
15 seconds. And then do the other side. If you do that,
like once or twice before starting
your vertical pulls you should activate the area enough so that you get more out of
the exercise that you're doing as for your horizontal pulls
Now this works,
this method is going to work no matter what you're doing. Just make sure if you,
if you do this, you go light. Okay?
Because you never want to fall into spinal flection when doing a horizontal
pull. That's how you get hurt. It's how you basically destroy your back.
But we're going to use a little bit of spinal flection to help us out here.
So just keep that in mind, go light with this. So what we're going to do
is we're going to take this bar. Okay? And now when doing a low row,
proper form, is this, okay? You pull it back,
retract your shoulder blades. Then as you come forward,
we lean forward like this.
And we go forward just far enough to feel that stretch in our lats before
coming back to the starting position. Okay? So it looks like this.
And when I train a lot of my clients,
what I noticed out of the gate is they'll send me videos of them doing this
exercise.
And they'll either stand up straight like this and just pull.
And they're using a lot more arms than they should,
or because they're not really feeling it in their back.
They start to kind of go into flection and out of flexion as they're doing the
exercise, because the only time they feel it area activate.
So what I want you guys to do, like I said, as I want you to go light,
okay? And so this is a warm up, okay. This is a warm up to activate the area.
I want you to keep your chest up and come forward like this.
And then once you get to about this point,
you're going to feel that stretch in your lats.
I want you to slowly kinda go into spinal flection like
this. And about right here,
you're going to start to feel a nice tight pull on the lats. And to be honest,
the weight is actually back on the stack at this point too.
So it's not like we're holding that weight in the air.
And what I'm actually doing is I'm pushing my back backwards like this,
to feel more of that stretch. And then I'm going to start over,
come back to the top, come forward, feel that tight,
pull on my lats. And it wants to wait touches.
I'm going to go into spinal flexion and push back.
So do it one more time. Okay.
Come forward let the weight,
touch the stack and then kind of push and feel my
back activate. And that should be enough to start to drive more mind,
muscle connection to the area so that when you do your actual set, I mean,
you're feeling the exercises where you're supposed to feel them. Okay.
And like I said, it doesn't really matter.
It's really hard to put together a bad workout plan. I mean,
you can have perfect form on your pull ups.
You can have perfect form on your rows, but your form might be great.
But if you're not feeling that stretch, when you're doing your back exercises,
you're not fully locking out your arms and really feeling your muscles moving
the weight. That's probably why. So give that a shot one,
to two sets maybe before you start your working sets for each exercise and let
me know down in the comment section below,
if this tip helped you and what muscle group you'd like to see me cover next.
And if you miss the chest video, you can click the link right here.
It'll take you right to it.
They'll show you how to activate more upper chest when you're training.
And if you need a new program, take to the gym,
I have a hundred percent free program called guarantee gains that you can get by
clicking this link and you can download the free PDF.
I'll see you guys next time.