What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
We're starting a new series here today on this channel.
Sore in six minutes.
Today we're going to start with the lats.
You see, we did a video all about workout soreness and how eccentric tension, and loading
during the lengthening of a muscle is one of the ways to spark, at least a stimulus,
for muscle growth by causing some micro damage to those fibers themselves.
That's not the only way to create muscle growth, but it's one of the ways we know how to do
that, through that mechanical tension.
With the lats you either have to choose the right exercises, or you have to do them the
right way, or as I'm going to show you today, a combination of each because the right exercises
allow you to apply the techniques the right way.
But before do you have to understand a little bit about Raymond.
Right?
Everybody knows Raymond.
You have to know that the anatomy of the lats themselves are going to allow us to do that,
if you understand this.
So the lats are going to attach on the inside here to the spinous process.
All these little bumps back here on your vertebrae.
All the way down to the lumbar spine.
They're going to come out here, all the way to the upper arm on the back of the upper
arm.
So when you want to stretch a muscle you can take those two points and bring them further
apart from each other and you can stretch that muscle.
We also know that it feeds down here through some fascia into the top of our pelvis.
So we also have a control point with the pelvis.
If the pelvis is moving away from the back of the arm here we can also do that.
So that being said, let's start applying some of these techniques to this is minute routine.
If you don’t get sore, I promise you; you will get sore by doing this.
So let's go here now to the lat pull down.
On the lat pull down, the first thing I do is I position my arms with my elbows a little
bit in front of my body.
That's very similar to a chin up, but the real effect is that, the arm being in place
here is allowing the stretch point, or the point of stretching of the lats to be greater
because this point is getting further away from this point than it would be if it was
over here.
So now, by doing that, you've already placed a greater stretch on the lats and we have
to apply the load.
When you come down, do as normal.
Retract your shoulder blades.
Pull them together on the bottom of the pull down.
But as you go up, don’t just allow your elbows to come forward, but allow the bar
to go forward as well.
Protract your scapula.
Reverse the retraction that you have.
Now, if you have an unstable shoulder, or if you have a really bad shoulder at the moment,
this may not feel comfortable.
If that's the case, don’t do it.
But if your shoulder is feeling good this should feel totally normal because you're
going through the motions here of the shoulder blades.
Protraction and retraction.
You'll feel a tremendously increased stretch on the lats with even a couple reps, but we
have to apply a tempo here.
We've got to prolong that eccentric lengthening.
So put three seconds on the eccentric portion of the lift, one second on the way down.
If you do a 12 rep max load you're looking at 48 seconds, or so.
We're going to go for a minute.
So even if you have to rest and pause, that's fine.
Take that all the way through and then move on to the next exercise.
That is a lat pullover.
A dumbbell lat pullover.
When we position ourselves here on the bench what we want to do is, look at that point
of attachment down at the pelvis.
If we can take the pelvis and move it further away from the arm then we're golden.
We can do that by actually dropping down.
Now, once we've established that position we've got to increase stretch on the lats.
Now we have to apply the tension.
So let's do a 21 style.
Again, don’t just do a lat pullover.
Let's throw something at your muscles that they haven't necessarily felt before, and
also at the same time, prolong the time that you're going to spend on that eccentric portion
of the lift.
So you're going to do a 21 style.
The top third, just hang out in the top third motion here.
Pelvis is dropped.
Do the seven reps in the upper third of this exercise.
Then immediately, without resting, go down to the bottom portion.
This is where you're really going to feel the stretch.
You're going to keep those hips dropped as much as you can.
If your lats are really tight you're going to find that your hips are going to want to
pop up every time you let the dumbbell go backward.
But try to keep them as far apart as you can and hang out in just the bottom third and
do seven reps.
Then from here, again without resting, now we're going to go to a full rep.
we're actually going to take the lat through this full stretch, full contraction.
So allow the pelvis to drop as you stretch back, and then come up into neutral as you
pull the dumbbells back up toward the top.
So you now go through, again, seven reps here, and now you've got yourself the second minute
using a 12 rep max load of this six minute routine.
Now you might be thinking "You know what would be a good exercise, Jeff?
A dumbbell one-armed row."
Because you can do it in a lawnmower style – as I've shown before – where you reach
out at the bottom and pull up, and you get a nice stretch.
Not really.
If you look at it, when we get down to the bottom here, we are getting a good stretch
if we allow the dumbbell to move forward, but we're not really getting the tension.
The tension gets shifted to the front delt as I try to lift the dumbbell up from below,
at that 90 degree point.
So it's not necessarily getting the stretch and the load at the same time.
It's sort of just getting the stretch.
Not a bad exercise, just not the best way to have a loaded eccentric in that exercise,
or as the one that we're going to try to do.
But we can do what I'm going to show you here.
This is actually an exercise we've built right into AX1.
It's a rotational high row.
So what we have here is, now we've got the opportunity to get our arm – right here
– further away from, not just our pelvis, but also the spinous processes in our spine
because we can rotate that way, and keep this over here.
So you can see that these two points are going to get further away if I take these and move
them over there.
That's what we're doing by rotating.
At the same time we're going to also rotate the pelvis over there while this stays over
here.
So creating all this length there as I go through this row.
So you can see, I try to row to the middle.
I've got that protraction, or that retraction of the scapula again, and then I allow it
to wrap around my body and protract, and increase that stretch.
Spending time, again, on that long duration – eccentric – to get that nice load, and
to really make sure that we're hitting it hard.
We spend one minute on the left arm, and one minute on the right arm.
That's just four minutes.
That's right, because we're not done yet.
What you have to do is go back to a set of the pullovers for one more minute, and finish
up with one more one minute set on the lat pull downs.
There's your six minutes.
As I said in the beginning, this is not meant to make you sore right now – although it
may, depending on your experience – but what it's meant to do is make you sore tomorrow,
or more importantly, even 48 hours from now.
You see, it’s not just the only way to create a stimulus for muscle growth, but soreness
manipulated the right way, through mechanical tension can.
That's what I want you to do here.
We're going to cover all the other muscle groups.
You let me know what you want to see and I'll do my best to do that.
In the meantime, if you're looking for a program that puts the science back in strength, head
to ATHLEANX.com right now and get our ATHLEANX training program.
All right, guys.
I'll be back here again in just a couple of days.
I'll see you soon.