Growing the Back is a big challenge for many. Even among top bodybuilders, the back is one of the last body parts to really come into it’s own.
The really great bodybuilders all had the best backs. It’s really one of those body parts that separated the good from the great.
There are a few reasons why the back is so difficult train and develop, relative to other body parts.
First, is because the “Back” is not a singular muscle group. It’s a series of muscle groups that basically interweave and overlap with one another and there really isn’t just one exercise that trains everything adequately for maximal development.
The spinal erectors, the lats, the rhomboids, the rear deltoids, the trapezius are primary big muscle groups that make up the back.
Second, many of the most useful exercises for the back are only useful in the presence of a strong mind muscle connection. This takes a long time to develop in a lifter and is one of the primary reasons why I don’t like Barbell Rows as a movement for novices.
90% of the Barbell Rows I see from novices are a combination of forearms, biceps, and hip extensors…..with minimal activity of the actual upper back / lats. So you can actually do the Row more or less correctly (if we simply evaluate the row as moving the weight from point A to point B) but get very little stress onto the actual target muscle groups if you don’t really know how to engage them in the movement.
Deadlifts don’t require a strong mind-muscle connection with the lats or any other muscle group in order to be effective. If you can get the mechanics of a deadlift even just “mostly” right, you are going to get a pretty good stimulus of most of the major muscle groups in the back, especially the erectors and traps.
This is what makes the Deadlift so ideal for the novice as THE primary back building exercise. Teaching mechanics (moving a weight from point A to point B with a series of movement cues) is a bit easier than teaching proper mind-muscle connection, which seems like a bit of “bodybuilding voodoo” to many, and is not even a coherent concept to some novices.
This is part of what makes a routine like the Starting Strength Novice program so effective for novices. The exercises (Squat, Bench, Press, Deadlift) don’t just allow for maximal, progressive, and frequent loading….but the movements themselves are based mainly on mechanics, not subjective feeling.
We don’t teach novices to Bench Press by feeling their chest open up and stretch and then contract hard around their sternum as we might if we were teaching them how to do a Fly with a set of cables. We don’t teach them to flex their tricep and feel it contract hard at the top of the movement. We teach them to lower the bar to the chest and then return it back to the top. In doing so the chest and triceps will do their job and more or less be maximally stimulated…..or at least enough stimulation as is needed for a novice to grow. With time under the bar and more muscle mass added, movements such as a chest fly or isolation tricep movement will be easier to teach and get right later on if they make sense for a trainees goals.
Not surprisingly, the handful of cues that do rely quite a bit on “feeling” a body part contract, are difficult for novice trainees to master. “Setting the back” for a squat or deadlift is a common issue for new trainees. Some have no idea what you are talking about. You can stick your fingers right into their spinal erectors, ask them to contract/flex/extend/arch/set or any number of other seemingly useless commands and nothing happens. They simply have no mind-muscle connection. It’s not that those muscles cannot innervate – of course they can – they just can’t make it happen on command. They have no mind muscle connection. So it has to be practiced and taught.
This scenario is amplified 10x when trying to teach them how to do things like Barbell Rows or Pulldowns, where they are trying to learn to engage their lats, while simultaneously keeping their back set. They simply don’t know what a contraction of the lats is supposed to feel like, and so they rarely can make it happen with any sort of consistency.
When first trying to learn specific exercises for the lats/upper back, many new trainees will feel very little if any stimulation in the lats. If you ask them after a set of pull ups (and especially pulldowns or rows) “Where do you feel that?” most will report a pretty massive pump in the forearms and biceps and next to nothing in the target muscles of the lats.
They haven’t yet learned how to pull or row with their lats, and instead are doing the bulk of the work by pulling with their arms.
This will change over time with practice and coaching, but isn’t always an overnight transformation.
There are a number of different techniques that can help trainees learn to better engage their lats on lat exercises:
#1: Help them learn to feel their lats in the stretch position.
A proper mind muscle connection can feel the muscle engaged in all phases of the movement. It’s a bit easier to teach them to feel the muscle under a static loaded stretch (like at the top of a pulldown or the bottom of a pull up or row). As odd as it may sound to many of you who don’t struggle with this, some trainees don’t even really know where the lats are located, where they attach, or how they function. If you put them under a loaded stretch it’s a good place to start to build that mind muscle connection.
#2: Use straps, even when unnecessary.
I have to beat this into peoples head. For a back exercise, we use straps as a means to disengage the grip. When the trainee is tightly gripping the bar/handle he will tend to initiate the movement more by tugging with his forearms and biceps rather than initiating the pull with his lats.
Straps aren’t a “last resort” only when limited by grip strength. It’s not “cheating” to use straps. It’s a tool that will help you pull less with the arms and more with the lats.
So while maybe you CAN row with 135 or even 225 without the use of straps, you might not be getting much out of the exercise if you are having to grip the hell out of the bar. Relaxing the grip and the forearms is often necessary to get the most out of your back exercises.
#3: Tactile cues.
When my clients are doing chins, pulldowns, rows, etc I will often keep a finger or two on their lats as a “reminder” of where I want them to be concentrated and where I want them to feel a full stretch and contraction on each rep.
#4: Practice by holding the contracted position isometrically with light weight.
This is more of a “drill” that can be incorporated into the warm up sets. For instance, with a Row…pull the empty bar into the abs and then hold that position for a few seconds and really squeeze the shoulder blades together and feel all those muscles contract tightly for several seconds. Hold it tight until the right muscles start to burn. The lower the bar into the stretched position and repeat several more times.
Focus on exactly what that position feels like when contracted maximally. As you load up the weight keep focused on repeating that type of contraction. Eventually you’ll be able to generate hard contractions of the lats / upper back even with very heavy more explosive reps.
You can do the same thing on a Pulldown machine. Pull the bar to the upper chest and hold it there. Squeeze the lats back and down HARD and hold that contraction for several seconds and establish in your brain what that position feels like and then incorporate that into all of your work sets.
In Part 2 we’ll look at some potential strategies to set up a good back routine across the week as part of a full power building routine.
