What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, AthleanX.com.
I want to show you today a quick way that you can change the way you do a lat pull-down
to get more out of the exercise, especially if you're one of the type that feels that
your biceps fatigue much faster than your back when you're doing the exercise.
We know that when we do a lat pull-down a lot of times it can become a bicep dominant
movement and it doesn't have to be.
I think one of the big issues is that we're not really utilizing the full stretch of the
lats and therefore can't get a strong enough contraction out of the lats.
We know that in order to create the strongest contraction from a muscle you want to precede
it with a stretch.
We can do that by changing the way we do the lat pull-down.
I talked about, a few weeks ago, how to stretch our lats out properly.
It's not just having our arms up and overhead.
Yes, that will stretch our lats, but only in one plane.
We want to make sure we get a rotational stretch in there and want to make sure we get this
frontal plane stretch, or the side bending component in there.
We can do that by changing the way we sit at the machine.
Instead of going up, overhead – which I'll show you again right here – you can see
that when I do a lat pull-down I do get a stretch on the lats there, and I come down
and I get a contraction.
I'm a little bit limited to how far back I can contract by the bar hitting my chest.
But we can change both of those things if we change our orientation in the machine.
So, if I come and I sit askew here, off to one side instead of straddling the machine,
now you sit off to one side, I let my left knee anchor into the pad right here.
It would be nice if I just had a single handle, but I'm just going to use my one hand in the
middle of this bar, just because it's easier for me to demonstrate at the moment.
Now, what I can do is actually get that side bend in here.
Just by shifting my hips towards you guys I have the side bend component here of the
lats and I also have, of course, the overhead component.
I even have a little bit of a rotation component by rotating that way.
Now, as I pull down you could see that, first of all, I'll be able to get a stronger contraction
because I've got, again, the muscle on full stretch.
When I get down to the bottom I could also, by rotating back in the opposite direction,
get a stronger contraction here on the lats and hit bottom.
So, I've kind of addressed all of the issues at once.
This hand could be right here to help stabilize and you can see that the stretch on the lat
here is pretty intense and I can feel a much bigger movement here and contraction in my
lats.
Therefore, over time, we'll be able to build much better lats because of it.
So, remember, it's not necessarily the exercises you're doing.
It could be the way you're doing the exercises and even the way you position yourself to
do the exercises that makes a big difference in the results that you use from them.
These are the kind of things that we spend a lot of time looking at and addressing when
we trained because we want to make sure that we get the most out of every single ounce
of our training and every single minute we spend in the gym.
So, if you're looking for a program that allows you to get the most out of every single thing
you do in the gym, I'd advise you to head to AthleanX.com and get one of our Athlean-X
training systems.
Maybe you'll have access to a lat pull-down machine where you are, or you train at home.
That's fine.
We've got programs there as well that require absolutely no equipment at all.
That would be Athlean-0.
Hopefully you found this helpful.
Again, if you do have access; try it.
Just make a little turn of your body into the machine and you'll see much different
results from the exercise itself.
With that said, I'll be back here again in just a few days.
Make sure you leave your comments and thumbs up below.
Let me know what you want to see.
I will do my damnedest to bring these videos to you guys each and every week.
All right.
Talk to you again soon.