What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today I’m going to teach you how to get a more muscular looking back.
You see, it’s not complicated.
It really isn’t.
It’s very, very simple.
But it’s hard because it requires a lot more concentration than you might be giving
your back at the moment.
A lot of guys fall victim to this because they can’t see their back.
It’s on the opposite side and they don’t get the gratification they do when they’re
training biceps in the mirror.
But don’t make that mistake because all it takes is a little bit of focus.
This guy in the thumbnail here, that’s not me on the opposite side.
We look different.
The difference, though, is probably not in size.
He’s probably about the same size as me, but the difference in back muscularity is
evident because I really, really focus on how I do each and every rep.
I want to teach you how to do that exactly the same way here.
I’m going to give you a complete routine.
It’s another Size in Six routine.
Six minutes to show you how to do this if you want to get a better mind-muscle connection.
First of all, look what I’m doing here with my back.
We’re talking about activation.
The very first thing you need to know how to do – if you’re going to get any extra
development, or a better mind-muscle connection – is to learn how to adduct your arms into
your side.
One of the key functions of the lats.
You see, as soon as I pinch my elbows down, tight, into my sides I get instant activation
of the lats.
One of their prime functions.
So, what I want you to do as a warmup to this whole routine is squeeze and see if you can
feel any discomfort.
Remember we talked about it?
If it doesn’t feel uncomfortable you don’t really have a good mind-muscle connection
with that muscle.
Right there, off the get go, if you don’t get any kind of discomfort with an adduction
of your arms into your sides, it might be time to start worrying.
Not completely, yet.
At least not until we take this next step.
That is adding something to it.
Not just adducting and squeezing the elbows into the sides, but now extending the arms
behind your back.
So, we’re going to work and involve a lot more than just the lats.
We’re going to get some of the other back muscles involved in here as well.
You should feel this collaborative effort between these muscles to make it an even more
intense contraction.
If you don’t feel anything here, if it doesn’t start to get to be difficult to hold this
then you really need to start working more on this exercise.
You need to start doing just these things alone to improve your mind-muscle connection.
Now we go one step further.
We know that the lats, because they wrap around, they come all the way around from the back,
up, and attach up here to our arm; they have rotary capability.
They can pull down, and around, down, and around.
So, if we don’t utilize any type of rotation in our activation then we’re missing out.
This is where you should really feel it.
If you’ve already done the adduction, if you’ve already pinched your shoulder blades
and pulled your arms back behind your body, and now you rotate to one side; it should
get to be an extremely intense contraction that you can’t tolerate for very long.
If that’s not the case, then you’d better start doing what I’m showing you here – these
activation drills – more often.
You can do them frequently.
Three or four times a week.
But now we can take it over to a routine because this routine is going to reinforce everything
we just did in the form of an exercise.
All you need to do is have a lat pulldown machine, and somewhere you can do a very simple,
basic Y without any weight.
Trust me, you won’t need it.
Here’s what we do.
We go over here to the lat pulldown machine and we take an underhand grip.
Why?
Because it’s simulating that first act we did over here, which is the adduction.
The squeezing of the elbows down, tight, and to your sides.
You can see me doing that.
Now, it’s not just getting down and speeding out of that rep.
It’s getting down and squeezing it, really trying to feel it every, single rep.
We do that and move on, after doing that for one minute, to the Y.
The Y is an exercise that we do without weights with our chest face-down on an incline bench,
about 20 or 30 degrees up.
What we do is, we get our shoulder blades pinched back together, and then we reach up
into a Y position up, over our head.
You do not need the weight if you are squeezing for dear life.
What I’m trying to do is take the back of my hands and press them up into the ceiling
if possible.
Obviously, they’re not going to reach, but you can see that the lower traps – right
here, I’m focusing on those lower traps – those muscles are firing in ways that
you probably can’t activate in other exercises.
Especially not a straight lat pulldown.
You’re not getting that activation here.
Eccentrically, maybe.
But not concentrically.
So, we need to focus on that.
These little exercises work.
But I’m squeezing as hard as I possibly can because I’m going for the quality of
every contraction.
Then I do this for one minute.
Then I head back over to the lat pulldown again, but this time we’re not going underhand.
What we’re going to do is go overhand and focus on getting the elbows back behind the
body at the same time.
You can see this is evident by the fact that all the muscles in the back are contracting
here.
Even the traps, as I get down to the bottom, you can see them kicking in.
As well as, obviously, the teres major and minor.
All these muscles across my back here are really starting to work.
All I had to do was focus on the squeeze.
A lot of us just go up and down, up and down.
We move the bar down to our chest and we get it back up again.
Not enough if you want muscularity.
If you want to pull out all these muscles here, if you don’t want to look like the
guy in the thumbnail, and you want to get a more muscular looking back you need to start
focusing on these things.
We do this for a minute and we go back to those good, old Ys one more time.
Reinforce them.
I don’t care if you only get six reps.
Spread them out over 10 seconds a piece.
They’re all going to count because that’s what we’re going for here.
The quality of contraction.
Then you come back to the lat pulldown and this time we’re doing our rocking pulldown.
Now, it’s not forwards and back rocking like the cheating pulldown.
Don’t do that.
What we’re talking about is this rocking pulldown that allows us to pull the bar down
to about eye level, and then from there, pull back with one hand.
You wait until you feel this.
If you haven’t already done this, guys, I’ve shown this to you months ago.
It’s incredible how it feels.
But you will feel a contraction like you never have before if you try this.
What you’re trying to do is get that rotation back and around.
Then come up, and pull down, and get that rotation back, and around to the other side.
Every time, going for a good, quality contraction.
That brings us to five minutes.
We’re not done.
There’s one other thing you can always benefit from, especially after doing all this really
focused contraction.
That is stretching the damn lats out.
A great way to do that is with this stretch pulldown.
All I’m doing here is, as I let the bar rise back up to a starting position, I allow
my torso to sink back.
Why?
Because if I can separate the distance between the arm here, where the lat attaches, and
down here where my pelvis is, I can make that distance longer, and I can get a better stretch.
So, if I sink back and reach out I’m getting a really good stretch on the lats every, single
time.
It’s just a great way to finish this off so you don’t feel completely tight after
doing all these focused contractions.
So, guys, implement this.
I promise you, if you have to start with the activation techniques alone, fine.
They’re going to go a long way toward helping you to get better control of your muscles
in your back so when you take it over to the lat pulldown you’ll be a lot better at it.
It’s not just the lat pulldown.
It’s a row, it’s a pullup, it’s every, single exercise you do.
You want to squeeze it.
You want to feel as if the muscle is doing the work.
Don’t be satisfied with just pulling the weight down and getting it from A to B. It’s
the quality of what you do that matters most.
If you’re looking for a program that – we really place a high emphasis on quality, but
at the same time I teach you step by step what to do; those are all over at ATHLEANX.com.
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All right, see you soon.