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Build a Bigger Back
9 Tips for Wider, Thicker Wings
By Ron Harris
Why Back Development Matters So Much
I’ll start this one off for those of you who compete or who aspire to one day. You’ve heard it a million times, “contests are won from the back.” This doesn’t mean that bodybuilding is judged on who has the best back. The crux of the statement is the common occurrence that especially at the local and regional levels of competition, you tend to see a lot of well-developed shoulders, chests, arms and often the quads, but the posterior chain, meaning the back, glutes and hamstrings, lag significantly in comparison. It’s rare that you will see more than a handful of impressive backs even at a large regional show. I’m fully aware that many of you could care less about ever stepping onstage, but you should still want your back to be the best it can be if you at least want to look like a “real bodybuilder” and not some wannabe half-assing it. I see a ton of guys who look pretty big and jacked from the front because they do have some beef in the chest, shoulders and arms, but from the back they literally look half the size. Do you really want to look like you weigh 250 pounds from the front and 180 pounds from the back? Lastly, having dominant pushing muscles and weaker pulling muscles eventually wreaks havoc with your posture. When the disparity in size and strength between the chest/front delts and back/rear delts is pronounced enough, the person takes on the forward-slouching posture of an ape. Stronger lats, rear delts and lower back will pull your torsos back and up.
Now, assuming I’ve convinced you to pay more attention to your back, here are nine tips to make it a strong point, both literally and visually, on your physique.
1. Do More for Back Than Chest, Shoulders, or Arms
I’d venture to say that the reason most people never reach their full potential in back development is simply that they never put as much time and effort into it as they did other muscle groups. Think about it this way. The chest is not an overly complex muscle group. You can work it thoroughly with no more than three movements, honestly: a flat press, an incline press and some type of flye movement. Yet you often see guys spending 90 minutes on chest, doing five to six exercises for four to five sets each. You will often see those very same dudes ripping through an entire back “workout,” and I use the term loosely, in 30 minutes or less. Some men do a couple sets of lat pulldowns, a couple of sets of cable rows, and call it a day so they can head off to spend an hour on biceps! The back complex encompasses not only the lats, but also the trapezius muscle, the muscles around the scapulae such as the rhomboids, teres major and minor, and the spinal erectors of the lower back. Each of these needs to be worked with different exercises from different angles of pull, and even at a faster training pace it should take a minimum of 45 minutes to properly train your back. If your back workouts are shorter than those for your chest, shoulders or arms, you are selling your back short.
2. Focus on Feeling Contractions
The other major reason most trainers never maximize their potential for back development is that they never “feel” their backs working and merely pull weights from point A to point B. In many cases the culprit is simply using too much weight and relying on heaving and cheating rather than forcing the actual muscles to forcefully contract with each rep. Feeling the back work isn’t easy, and aside from momentum, other muscle groups often rob the lats of the intended stress. There was an old saying, “show me a man with great biceps and I will show you a man with a weak back.” I’ve known more than a few men who embodied that statement. If you are one of the many who have always struggled to achieve those powerful lat contractions needed to stimulate growth, I urge you to start all over with very light weights. Stop worrying about who might be watching you at the gym and use 80 pounds for lat pulldowns, or a 30-pound dumbbell for one-arm rows. Close your eyes and do slow, squeezing reps, really making the lats do the work and feeling the muscle contract every inch of the way. Only when you have nailed this mind-muscle connection should you even think about upping the weight. It’s humbling and I know it can be frustrating to seemingly take steps backward in terms of weight but focus on the end result. Without quality contractions, those heavier weights weren’t producing results anyway. You will be shocked to find that for example, rowing a 70-pound dumbbell and getting contractions and a pump will result in bigger, thicker lats than yanking a 120 like you’re trying to start a lawnmower and feeling zilch going on in your lats.
3. Do Chins, and Do Them First
Most men who built tremendous backs give credit to chin-ups as being a critical part of their foundation for upper back width, and some like Kai Greene and Victor Martinez continued to keep chins in their back routines throughout their entire pro careers. This is rare. Chins are tough, and even more so once your bodyweight gets well past the 200-220-pound range as theirs did. Most bodybuilders abandon chins after a certain point and do lat pulldowns instead. This is a mistake. The hardest exercises are the most productive, and it’s not easy pulling your own bodyweight up to a bar. Doing so with control and squeezing contractions is even more challenging, and anyone who can do this with additional resistance strapped on is a true stud. Do yourself and your upper back a huge favor and start doing chins again if you got away from them. You should always do them first thing on back day. If you wait until you’ve already done even one or two other exercises first, your performance on chins will suffer greatly and you will likely get discouraged. They also make a perfect warm-up for all the heavier stuff like rows and deadlifts.
4. Realize That Width Alone Isn’t Enough
Many are under the false impression that width alone is the measure of a great back. If we lived in a two-dimensional reality, that might be true. But since we have three convenient dimensions, a back also needs to be thick, meaning inches of meat built up away from the spine. I also refer to this as part of “front-to-back thickness,” meaning you should see that thickness evident when turned sideways. Width comes long before thickness for most bodybuilders, and in fact a gifted bone structure with wide clavicles and narrow hips already imparts a certain degree of upper back width even with minimal development. Chin-ups and lat pulldowns will contribute to greater back width, but that prime real estate in back of you needs to be filled in with plenty of rows, deadlifts and rack pulls.
5. Do Non-supported Rows If You Can
Speaking of rows, you will get the most bang for your buck from the two most basic free-weight rows you can do, barbell rows and T-bar rows. The two greatest backs of our generation and perhaps of all time belonged to Mr. Olympia champions Dorian Yates and Ronnie Coleman. Dorian used the reverse-grip barbell row as his staple thickness movement and did controlled reps with 455 pounds in his prime years. Ronnie used 495 for barbell rows and piled on as many as 11 45-pound plates (495 again) for his T-bar rows with an Olympic bar jammed into a corner. These non-supported, freestanding free-weight rows seem to be the absolute most effective at increasing lat thickness, as they allow the greatest range of motion and also force you to fight to keep everything tight and maintain good posture and form.
6. Do Supported Rows If You Must
There are cases where you would be better served performing your rowing movements with the chest braced. The most compelling reason would be in the case of a lower back injury or a history of lower back injuries. Trying to maintain proper bent posture with a slight arch in the lower back becomes impossible when the lower back has been compromised by injuries. The resistance will naturally pull you forward and sooner or later the lower back rounds, putting you at tremendous risk for another lumbar mishap. The other instance where supported T-bar rows and various rowing machines like Hammer Strength or Arsenal Strength would come in handy would be for someone who simply can’t get the form down right on barbell or T-bars and finds themselves standing nearly upright, thus rendering the ROM far too short and effectively guaranteeing zero results. I would rather see someone using machines and activating his or her lats rather than struggle with awful form and never build a back.
7. Do at Least One Unilateral Row Every Workout
Achieving proper contractions for the lats is a challenge for most people, though it does seem that using one arm at a time helps tremendously. Most people find they can pull the weight just a bit further back using one arm also, and increased ROM is a benefit here. The king of unilateral movements is the one-arm dumbbell row, which is usually performed either with one leg up on a bench or squatting in front of a dumbbell rack, using the non-working arm to brace yourself. Since my lower back turned to glass a few years back, I do these facedown on an incline bench. There are also various plate-loading rowing machines that offer unilateral use, often with several grip options. And finally, the cable station can be used for one-arm rows, although the stronger among you may find the weight stacks insufficient for your powerful lats. I like to see back routines feature at least two rowing movements, one using both arms at once and another single-arm row.
8. Use Different Grips and Attachments
The back is such a large muscle complex that it’s exceedingly difficult to hit it from all angles in any one given workout without being there all day. If you have tried using different grip attachments for cable movements such as lat pulldowns and seated rows, you have probably noticed that each imparts a slightly different feel and seems to help you target areas like your mid or lower lats more effectively. For this reason, I encourage you to rotate various attachments and grips over the course of your workouts. Using the lat pulldown as an example, just with the standard bar attachment you can do the typical overhand grip just beyond shoulder width, or flip your hands over for reverse grip, spaced either at shoulder width or even closer. You can unclip that and attach pieces that allow for a neutral grip with both palms facing into the centerline of your body, either with a wider-spaced grip or else a version of the closer grip more often used for cable rows. You will note that many plate-loading rowing and pulldown machines provide several grip options as well. I do believe there is value, both physiologically and psychologically, in switching up your grips in your back training.
9. Stop the Low-rep Deadlifts
This last one is for you youngsters out there doing all your lifts in front of a tripod for the ‘gram. Muscles are stimulated to grow by being kept under tension for a certain amount of time – thus the term TUT, or time under tension. The optimal TUT has been translated into a repetition range. So, when you are told to do 10-12 reps for muscle hypertrophy, it’s the amount of time it takes to complete that many reps that’s the key, not the actual number or reps. Doing very low reps is excellent for increasing your strength, however it sucks at building muscle mass. Just as an example, I have known many guys who focused purely on getting stronger on squats and eventually could do a couple of reps with as much as 600-700 pounds. I’ve also known guys, and was one of those guys, who used squats more as a tool for building quadriceps mass and could do 10-20 reps with anywhere from 315 to 500 pounds. Those who did more reps with squats always had much bigger legs, even though the weights they used weren’t as heavy as what the guys out to build more power had on the bar. Deadlifts can do an incredible job at building a thicker back, but only if you stop stunting for social media and pull at least six to eight reps per set, and 10-12 would be even better.
You Know the Hacks, Now Get Your Back Jacked!
This hasn’t been a comprehensive back training dissertation, but we did go over some tremendously useful tips that can and will increase the productivity of your back workouts. Start applying them right away and I promise your back will start getting wider and thicker very soon!
Sample Back Workouts
Workout A
Chin-ups
4 x 10-12
Barbell Rows
4 x 10-12
Cable or Machine Pullovers
4 x 10-12
One-arm Dumbbell Rows
4 x 10-12, each arm
Rack Pulls
4 x 10-12
Workout B
Lat Pulldowns
4 x 12
T-Bar Rows
4 x 10-12
One-arm Machine Rows
4 x 10-12, each arm
Deadlifts
5 x 10
Ron Harris got his start in the bodybuilding industry during the eight years he worked in Los Angeles as Associate Producer for ESPN’s “American Muscle Magazine” show in the 1990s. Since 1992 he has published nearly 5,000 articles in bodybuilding and fitness magazines, making him the most prolific bodybuilding writer ever. Ron has been training since the age of 14 and competing as a bodybuilder since 1989. He lives with his wife and two children in the Boston area. Facebook Instagram
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Build a Bigger Back
9 Tips for Wider, Thicker Wings
By Ron Harris
Why Back Development Matters So Much
I’ll start this one off for those of you who compete or who aspire to one day. You’ve heard it a million times, “contests are won from the back.” This doesn’t mean that bodybuilding is judged on who has the best back. The crux of the statement is the common occurrence that especially at the local and regional levels of competition, you tend to see a lot of well-developed shoulders, chests, arms and often the quads, but the posterior chain, meaning the back, glutes and hamstrings, lag significantly in comparison. It’s rare that you will see more than a handful of impressive backs even at a large regional show. I’m fully aware that many of you could care less about ever stepping onstage, but you should still want your back to be the best it can be if you at least want to look like a “real bodybuilder” and not some wannabe half-assing it. I see a ton of guys who look pretty big and jacked from the front because they do have some beef in the chest, shoulders and arms, but from the back they literally look half the size. Do you really want to look like you weigh 250 pounds from the front and 180 pounds from the back? Lastly, having dominant pushing muscles and weaker pulling muscles eventually wreaks havoc with your posture. When the disparity in size and strength between the chest/front delts and back/rear delts is pronounced enough, the person takes on the forward-slouching posture of an ape. Stronger lats, rear delts and lower back will pull your torsos back and up.
Now, assuming I’ve convinced you to pay more attention to your back, here are nine tips to make it a strong point, both literally and visually, on your physique.
1. Do More for Back Than Chest, Shoulders, or Arms
I’d venture to say that the reason most people never reach their full potential in back development is simply that they never put as much time and effort into it as they did other muscle groups. Think about it this way. The chest is not an overly complex muscle group. You can work it thoroughly with no more than three movements, honestly: a flat press, an incline press and some type of flye movement. Yet you often see guys spending 90 minutes on chest, doing five to six exercises for four to five sets each. You will often see those very same dudes ripping through an entire back “workout,” and I use the term loosely, in 30 minutes or less. Some men do a couple sets of lat pulldowns, a couple of sets of cable rows, and call it a day so they can head off to spend an hour on biceps! The back complex encompasses not only the lats, but also the trapezius muscle, the muscles around the scapulae such as the rhomboids, teres major and minor, and the spinal erectors of the lower back. Each of these needs to be worked with different exercises from different angles of pull, and even at a faster training pace it should take a minimum of 45 minutes to properly train your back. If your back workouts are shorter than those for your chest, shoulders or arms, you are selling your back short.
2. Focus on Feeling Contractions
The other major reason most trainers never maximize their potential for back development is that they never “feel” their backs working and merely pull weights from point A to point B. In many cases the culprit is simply using too much weight and relying on heaving and cheating rather than forcing the actual muscles to forcefully contract with each rep. Feeling the back work isn’t easy, and aside from momentum, other muscle groups often rob the lats of the intended stress. There was an old saying, “show me a man with great biceps and I will show you a man with a weak back.” I’ve known more than a few men who embodied that statement. If you are one of the many who have always struggled to achieve those powerful lat contractions needed to stimulate growth, I urge you to start all over with very light weights. Stop worrying about who might be watching you at the gym and use 80 pounds for lat pulldowns, or a 30-pound dumbbell for one-arm rows. Close your eyes and do slow, squeezing reps, really making the lats do the work and feeling the muscle contract every inch of the way. Only when you have nailed this mind-muscle connection should you even think about upping the weight. It’s humbling and I know it can be frustrating to seemingly take steps backward in terms of weight but focus on the end result. Without quality contractions, those heavier weights weren’t producing results anyway. You will be shocked to find that for example, rowing a 70-pound dumbbell and getting contractions and a pump will result in bigger, thicker lats than yanking a 120 like you’re trying to start a lawnmower and feeling zilch going on in your lats.
3. Do Chins, and Do Them First
Most men who built tremendous backs give credit to chin-ups as being a critical part of their foundation for upper back width, and some like Kai Greene and Victor Martinez continued to keep chins in their back routines throughout their entire pro careers. This is rare. Chins are tough, and even more so once your bodyweight gets well past the 200-220-pound range as theirs did. Most bodybuilders abandon chins after a certain point and do lat pulldowns instead. This is a mistake. The hardest exercises are the most productive, and it’s not easy pulling your own bodyweight up to a bar. Doing so with control and squeezing contractions is even more challenging, and anyone who can do this with additional resistance strapped on is a true stud. Do yourself and your upper back a huge favor and start doing chins again if you got away from them. You should always do them first thing on back day. If you wait until you’ve already done even one or two other exercises first, your performance on chins will suffer greatly and you will likely get discouraged. They also make a perfect warm-up for all the heavier stuff like rows and deadlifts.
4. Realize That Width Alone Isn’t Enough
Many are under the false impression that width alone is the measure of a great back. If we lived in a two-dimensional reality, that might be true. But since we have three convenient dimensions, a back also needs to be thick, meaning inches of meat built up away from the spine. I also refer to this as part of “front-to-back thickness,” meaning you should see that thickness evident when turned sideways. Width comes long before thickness for most bodybuilders, and in fact a gifted bone structure with wide clavicles and narrow hips already imparts a certain degree of upper back width even with minimal development. Chin-ups and lat pulldowns will contribute to greater back width, but that prime real estate in back of you needs to be filled in with plenty of rows, deadlifts and rack pulls.
5. Do Non-supported Rows If You Can
Speaking of rows, you will get the most bang for your buck from the two most basic free-weight rows you can do, barbell rows and T-bar rows. The two greatest backs of our generation and perhaps of all time belonged to Mr. Olympia champions Dorian Yates and Ronnie Coleman. Dorian used the reverse-grip barbell row as his staple thickness movement and did controlled reps with 455 pounds in his prime years. Ronnie used 495 for barbell rows and piled on as many as 11 45-pound plates (495 again) for his T-bar rows with an Olympic bar jammed into a corner. These non-supported, freestanding free-weight rows seem to be the absolute most effective at increasing lat thickness, as they allow the greatest range of motion and also force you to fight to keep everything tight and maintain good posture and form.
6. Do Supported Rows If You Must
There are cases where you would be better served performing your rowing movements with the chest braced. The most compelling reason would be in the case of a lower back injury or a history of lower back injuries. Trying to maintain proper bent posture with a slight arch in the lower back becomes impossible when the lower back has been compromised by injuries. The resistance will naturally pull you forward and sooner or later the lower back rounds, putting you at tremendous risk for another lumbar mishap. The other instance where supported T-bar rows and various rowing machines like Hammer Strength or Arsenal Strength would come in handy would be for someone who simply can’t get the form down right on barbell or T-bars and finds themselves standing nearly upright, thus rendering the ROM far too short and effectively guaranteeing zero results. I would rather see someone using machines and activating his or her lats rather than struggle with awful form and never build a back.
7. Do at Least One Unilateral Row Every Workout
Achieving proper contractions for the lats is a challenge for most people, though it does seem that using one arm at a time helps tremendously. Most people find they can pull the weight just a bit further back using one arm also, and increased ROM is a benefit here. The king of unilateral movements is the one-arm dumbbell row, which is usually performed either with one leg up on a bench or squatting in front of a dumbbell rack, using the non-working arm to brace yourself. Since my lower back turned to glass a few years back, I do these facedown on an incline bench. There are also various plate-loading rowing machines that offer unilateral use, often with several grip options. And finally, the cable station can be used for one-arm rows, although the stronger among you may find the weight stacks insufficient for your powerful lats. I like to see back routines feature at least two rowing movements, one using both arms at once and another single-arm row.
8. Use Different Grips and Attachments
The back is such a large muscle complex that it’s exceedingly difficult to hit it from all angles in any one given workout without being there all day. If you have tried using different grip attachments for cable movements such as lat pulldowns and seated rows, you have probably noticed that each imparts a slightly different feel and seems to help you target areas like your mid or lower lats more effectively. For this reason, I encourage you to rotate various attachments and grips over the course of your workouts. Using the lat pulldown as an example, just with the standard bar attachment you can do the typical overhand grip just beyond shoulder width, or flip your hands over for reverse grip, spaced either at shoulder width or even closer. You can unclip that and attach pieces that allow for a neutral grip with both palms facing into the centerline of your body, either with a wider-spaced grip or else a version of the closer grip more often used for cable rows. You will note that many plate-loading rowing and pulldown machines provide several grip options as well. I do believe there is value, both physiologically and psychologically, in switching up your grips in your back training.
9. Stop the Low-rep Deadlifts
This last one is for you youngsters out there doing all your lifts in front of a tripod for the ‘gram. Muscles are stimulated to grow by being kept under tension for a certain amount of time – thus the term TUT, or time under tension. The optimal TUT has been translated into a repetition range. So, when you are told to do 10-12 reps for muscle hypertrophy, it’s the amount of time it takes to complete that many reps that’s the key, not the actual number or reps. Doing very low reps is excellent for increasing your strength, however it sucks at building muscle mass. Just as an example, I have known many guys who focused purely on getting stronger on squats and eventually could do a couple of reps with as much as 600-700 pounds. I’ve also known guys, and was one of those guys, who used squats more as a tool for building quadriceps mass and could do 10-20 reps with anywhere from 315 to 500 pounds. Those who did more reps with squats always had much bigger legs, even though the weights they used weren’t as heavy as what the guys out to build more power had on the bar. Deadlifts can do an incredible job at building a thicker back, but only if you stop stunting for social media and pull at least six to eight reps per set, and 10-12 would be even better.
You Know the Hacks, Now Get Your Back Jacked!
This hasn’t been a comprehensive back training dissertation, but we did go over some tremendously useful tips that can and will increase the productivity of your back workouts. Start applying them right away and I promise your back will start getting wider and thicker very soon!
Sample Back Workouts
Workout A
Chin-ups
4 x 10-12
Barbell Rows
4 x 10-12
Cable or Machine Pullovers
4 x 10-12
One-arm Dumbbell Rows
4 x 10-12, each arm
Rack Pulls
4 x 10-12
Workout B
Lat Pulldowns
4 x 12
T-Bar Rows
4 x 10-12
One-arm Machine Rows
4 x 10-12, each arm
Deadlifts
5 x 10
Ron Harris got his start in the bodybuilding industry during the eight years he worked in Los Angeles as Associate Producer for ESPN’s “American Muscle Magazine” show in the 1990s. Since 1992 he has published nearly 5,000 articles in bodybuilding and fitness magazines, making him the most prolific bodybuilding writer ever. Ron has been training since the age of 14 and competing as a bodybuilder since 1989. He lives with his wife and two children in the Boston area. Facebook Instagram
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SUBSCRIBE TO MD TODAY
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VISIT OUR STORE
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER
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YOUTUBE
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9 Tips for Wider, Thicker Wings
By Ron Harris
Why Back Development Matters So Much
I’ll start this one off for those of you who compete or who aspire to one day. You’ve heard it a million times, “contests are won from the back.” This doesn’t mean that bodybuilding is judged on who has the best back. The crux of the statement is the common occurrence that especially at the local and regional levels of competition, you tend to see a lot of well-developed shoulders, chests, arms and often the quads, but the posterior chain, meaning the back, glutes and hamstrings, lag significantly in comparison. It’s rare that you will see more than a handful of impressive backs even at a large regional show. I’m fully aware that many of you could care less about ever stepping onstage, but you should still want your back to be the best it can be if you at least want to look like a “real bodybuilder” and not some wannabe half-assing it. I see a ton of guys who look pretty big and jacked from the front because they do have some beef in the chest, shoulders and arms, but from the back they literally look half the size. Do you really want to look like you weigh 250 pounds from the front and 180 pounds from the back? Lastly, having dominant pushing muscles and weaker pulling muscles eventually wreaks havoc with your posture. When the disparity in size and strength between the chest/front delts and back/rear delts is pronounced enough, the person takes on the forward-slouching posture of an ape. Stronger lats, rear delts and lower back will pull your torsos back and up.
Now, assuming I’ve convinced you to pay more attention to your back, here are nine tips to make it a strong point, both literally and visually, on your physique.
1. Do More for Back Than Chest, Shoulders, or Arms
I’d venture to say that the reason most people never reach their full potential in back development is simply that they never put as much time and effort into it as they did other muscle groups. Think about it this way. The chest is not an overly complex muscle group. You can work it thoroughly with no more than three movements, honestly: a flat press, an incline press and some type of flye movement. Yet you often see guys spending 90 minutes on chest, doing five to six exercises for four to five sets each. You will often see those very same dudes ripping through an entire back “workout,” and I use the term loosely, in 30 minutes or less. Some men do a couple sets of lat pulldowns, a couple of sets of cable rows, and call it a day so they can head off to spend an hour on biceps! The back complex encompasses not only the lats, but also the trapezius muscle, the muscles around the scapulae such as the rhomboids, teres major and minor, and the spinal erectors of the lower back. Each of these needs to be worked with different exercises from different angles of pull, and even at a faster training pace it should take a minimum of 45 minutes to properly train your back. If your back workouts are shorter than those for your chest, shoulders or arms, you are selling your back short.
2. Focus on Feeling Contractions
The other major reason most trainers never maximize their potential for back development is that they never “feel” their backs working and merely pull weights from point A to point B. In many cases the culprit is simply using too much weight and relying on heaving and cheating rather than forcing the actual muscles to forcefully contract with each rep. Feeling the back work isn’t easy, and aside from momentum, other muscle groups often rob the lats of the intended stress. There was an old saying, “show me a man with great biceps and I will show you a man with a weak back.” I’ve known more than a few men who embodied that statement. If you are one of the many who have always struggled to achieve those powerful lat contractions needed to stimulate growth, I urge you to start all over with very light weights. Stop worrying about who might be watching you at the gym and use 80 pounds for lat pulldowns, or a 30-pound dumbbell for one-arm rows. Close your eyes and do slow, squeezing reps, really making the lats do the work and feeling the muscle contract every inch of the way. Only when you have nailed this mind-muscle connection should you even think about upping the weight. It’s humbling and I know it can be frustrating to seemingly take steps backward in terms of weight but focus on the end result. Without quality contractions, those heavier weights weren’t producing results anyway. You will be shocked to find that for example, rowing a 70-pound dumbbell and getting contractions and a pump will result in bigger, thicker lats than yanking a 120 like you’re trying to start a lawnmower and feeling zilch going on in your lats.
3. Do Chins, and Do Them First
Most men who built tremendous backs give credit to chin-ups as being a critical part of their foundation for upper back width, and some like Kai Greene and Victor Martinez continued to keep chins in their back routines throughout their entire pro careers. This is rare. Chins are tough, and even more so once your bodyweight gets well past the 200-220-pound range as theirs did. Most bodybuilders abandon chins after a certain point and do lat pulldowns instead. This is a mistake. The hardest exercises are the most productive, and it’s not easy pulling your own bodyweight up to a bar. Doing so with control and squeezing contractions is even more challenging, and anyone who can do this with additional resistance strapped on is a true stud. Do yourself and your upper back a huge favor and start doing chins again if you got away from them. You should always do them first thing on back day. If you wait until you’ve already done even one or two other exercises first, your performance on chins will suffer greatly and you will likely get discouraged. They also make a perfect warm-up for all the heavier stuff like rows and deadlifts.
4. Realize That Width Alone Isn’t Enough
Many are under the false impression that width alone is the measure of a great back. If we lived in a two-dimensional reality, that might be true. But since we have three convenient dimensions, a back also needs to be thick, meaning inches of meat built up away from the spine. I also refer to this as part of “front-to-back thickness,” meaning you should see that thickness evident when turned sideways. Width comes long before thickness for most bodybuilders, and in fact a gifted bone structure with wide clavicles and narrow hips already imparts a certain degree of upper back width even with minimal development. Chin-ups and lat pulldowns will contribute to greater back width, but that prime real estate in back of you needs to be filled in with plenty of rows, deadlifts and rack pulls.
5. Do Non-supported Rows If You Can
Speaking of rows, you will get the most bang for your buck from the two most basic free-weight rows you can do, barbell rows and T-bar rows. The two greatest backs of our generation and perhaps of all time belonged to Mr. Olympia champions Dorian Yates and Ronnie Coleman. Dorian used the reverse-grip barbell row as his staple thickness movement and did controlled reps with 455 pounds in his prime years. Ronnie used 495 for barbell rows and piled on as many as 11 45-pound plates (495 again) for his T-bar rows with an Olympic bar jammed into a corner. These non-supported, freestanding free-weight rows seem to be the absolute most effective at increasing lat thickness, as they allow the greatest range of motion and also force you to fight to keep everything tight and maintain good posture and form.
6. Do Supported Rows If You Must
There are cases where you would be better served performing your rowing movements with the chest braced. The most compelling reason would be in the case of a lower back injury or a history of lower back injuries. Trying to maintain proper bent posture with a slight arch in the lower back becomes impossible when the lower back has been compromised by injuries. The resistance will naturally pull you forward and sooner or later the lower back rounds, putting you at tremendous risk for another lumbar mishap. The other instance where supported T-bar rows and various rowing machines like Hammer Strength or Arsenal Strength would come in handy would be for someone who simply can’t get the form down right on barbell or T-bars and finds themselves standing nearly upright, thus rendering the ROM far too short and effectively guaranteeing zero results. I would rather see someone using machines and activating his or her lats rather than struggle with awful form and never build a back.
7. Do at Least One Unilateral Row Every Workout
Achieving proper contractions for the lats is a challenge for most people, though it does seem that using one arm at a time helps tremendously. Most people find they can pull the weight just a bit further back using one arm also, and increased ROM is a benefit here. The king of unilateral movements is the one-arm dumbbell row, which is usually performed either with one leg up on a bench or squatting in front of a dumbbell rack, using the non-working arm to brace yourself. Since my lower back turned to glass a few years back, I do these facedown on an incline bench. There are also various plate-loading rowing machines that offer unilateral use, often with several grip options. And finally, the cable station can be used for one-arm rows, although the stronger among you may find the weight stacks insufficient for your powerful lats. I like to see back routines feature at least two rowing movements, one using both arms at once and another single-arm row.
8. Use Different Grips and Attachments
The back is such a large muscle complex that it’s exceedingly difficult to hit it from all angles in any one given workout without being there all day. If you have tried using different grip attachments for cable movements such as lat pulldowns and seated rows, you have probably noticed that each imparts a slightly different feel and seems to help you target areas like your mid or lower lats more effectively. For this reason, I encourage you to rotate various attachments and grips over the course of your workouts. Using the lat pulldown as an example, just with the standard bar attachment you can do the typical overhand grip just beyond shoulder width, or flip your hands over for reverse grip, spaced either at shoulder width or even closer. You can unclip that and attach pieces that allow for a neutral grip with both palms facing into the centerline of your body, either with a wider-spaced grip or else a version of the closer grip more often used for cable rows. You will note that many plate-loading rowing and pulldown machines provide several grip options as well. I do believe there is value, both physiologically and psychologically, in switching up your grips in your back training.
9. Stop the Low-rep Deadlifts
This last one is for you youngsters out there doing all your lifts in front of a tripod for the ‘gram. Muscles are stimulated to grow by being kept under tension for a certain amount of time – thus the term TUT, or time under tension. The optimal TUT has been translated into a repetition range. So, when you are told to do 10-12 reps for muscle hypertrophy, it’s the amount of time it takes to complete that many reps that’s the key, not the actual number or reps. Doing very low reps is excellent for increasing your strength, however it sucks at building muscle mass. Just as an example, I have known many guys who focused purely on getting stronger on squats and eventually could do a couple of reps with as much as 600-700 pounds. I’ve also known guys, and was one of those guys, who used squats more as a tool for building quadriceps mass and could do 10-20 reps with anywhere from 315 to 500 pounds. Those who did more reps with squats always had much bigger legs, even though the weights they used weren’t as heavy as what the guys out to build more power had on the bar. Deadlifts can do an incredible job at building a thicker back, but only if you stop stunting for social media and pull at least six to eight reps per set, and 10-12 would be even better.
You Know the Hacks, Now Get Your Back Jacked!
This hasn’t been a comprehensive back training dissertation, but we did go over some tremendously useful tips that can and will increase the productivity of your back workouts. Start applying them right away and I promise your back will start getting wider and thicker very soon!
Sample Back Workouts
Workout A
Chin-ups
4 x 10-12
Barbell Rows
4 x 10-12
Cable or Machine Pullovers
4 x 10-12
One-arm Dumbbell Rows
4 x 10-12, each arm
Rack Pulls
4 x 10-12
Workout B
Lat Pulldowns
4 x 12
T-Bar Rows
4 x 10-12
One-arm Machine Rows
4 x 10-12, each arm
Deadlifts
5 x 10
Ron Harris got his start in the bodybuilding industry during the eight years he worked in Los Angeles as Associate Producer for ESPN’s “American Muscle Magazine” show in the 1990s. Since 1992 he has published nearly 5,000 articles in bodybuilding and fitness magazines, making him the most prolific bodybuilding writer ever. Ron has been training since the age of 14 and competing as a bodybuilder since 1989. He lives with his wife and two children in the Boston area. Facebook Instagram
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Build a Bigger Back
9 Tips for Wider, Thicker Wings
By Ron Harris
Why Back Development Matters So Much
I’ll start this one off for those of you who compete or who aspire to one day. You’ve heard it a million times, “contests are won from the back.” This doesn’t mean that bodybuilding is judged on who has the best back. The crux of the statement is the common occurrence that especially at the local and regional levels of competition, you tend to see a lot of well-developed shoulders, chests, arms and often the quads, but the posterior chain, meaning the back, glutes and hamstrings, lag significantly in comparison. It’s rare that you will see more than a handful of impressive backs even at a large regional show. I’m fully aware that many of you could care less about ever stepping onstage, but you should still want your back to be the best it can be if you at least want to look like a “real bodybuilder” and not some wannabe half-assing it. I see a ton of guys who look pretty big and jacked from the front because they do have some beef in the chest, shoulders and arms, but from the back they literally look half the size. Do you really want to look like you weigh 250 pounds from the front and 180 pounds from the back? Lastly, having dominant pushing muscles and weaker pulling muscles eventually wreaks havoc with your posture. When the disparity in size and strength between the chest/front delts and back/rear delts is pronounced enough, the person takes on the forward-slouching posture of an ape. Stronger lats, rear delts and lower back will pull your torsos back and up.
Now, assuming I’ve convinced you to pay more attention to your back, here are nine tips to make it a strong point, both literally and visually, on your physique.
1. Do More for Back Than Chest, Shoulders, or Arms
I’d venture to say that the reason most people never reach their full potential in back development is simply that they never put as much time and effort into it as they did other muscle groups. Think about it this way. The chest is not an overly complex muscle group. You can work it thoroughly with no more than three movements, honestly: a flat press, an incline press and some type of flye movement. Yet you often see guys spending 90 minutes on chest, doing five to six exercises for four to five sets each. You will often see those very same dudes ripping through an entire back “workout,” and I use the term loosely, in 30 minutes or less. Some men do a couple sets of lat pulldowns, a couple of sets of cable rows, and call it a day so they can head off to spend an hour on biceps! The back complex encompasses not only the lats, but also the trapezius muscle, the muscles around the scapulae such as the rhomboids, teres major and minor, and the spinal erectors of the lower back. Each of these needs to be worked with different exercises from different angles of pull, and even at a faster training pace it should take a minimum of 45 minutes to properly train your back. If your back workouts are shorter than those for your chest, shoulders or arms, you are selling your back short.
2. Focus on Feeling Contractions
The other major reason most trainers never maximize their potential for back development is that they never “feel” their backs working and merely pull weights from point A to point B. In many cases the culprit is simply using too much weight and relying on heaving and cheating rather than forcing the actual muscles to forcefully contract with each rep. Feeling the back work isn’t easy, and aside from momentum, other muscle groups often rob the lats of the intended stress. There was an old saying, “show me a man with great biceps and I will show you a man with a weak back.” I’ve known more than a few men who embodied that statement. If you are one of the many who have always struggled to achieve those powerful lat contractions needed to stimulate growth, I urge you to start all over with very light weights. Stop worrying about who might be watching you at the gym and use 80 pounds for lat pulldowns, or a 30-pound dumbbell for one-arm rows. Close your eyes and do slow, squeezing reps, really making the lats do the work and feeling the muscle contract every inch of the way. Only when you have nailed this mind-muscle connection should you even think about upping the weight. It’s humbling and I know it can be frustrating to seemingly take steps backward in terms of weight but focus on the end result. Without quality contractions, those heavier weights weren’t producing results anyway. You will be shocked to find that for example, rowing a 70-pound dumbbell and getting contractions and a pump will result in bigger, thicker lats than yanking a 120 like you’re trying to start a lawnmower and feeling zilch going on in your lats.
3. Do Chins, and Do Them First
Most men who built tremendous backs give credit to chin-ups as being a critical part of their foundation for upper back width, and some like Kai Greene and Victor Martinez continued to keep chins in their back routines throughout their entire pro careers. This is rare. Chins are tough, and even more so once your bodyweight gets well past the 200-220-pound range as theirs did. Most bodybuilders abandon chins after a certain point and do lat pulldowns instead. This is a mistake. The hardest exercises are the most productive, and it’s not easy pulling your own bodyweight up to a bar. Doing so with control and squeezing contractions is even more challenging, and anyone who can do this with additional resistance strapped on is a true stud. Do yourself and your upper back a huge favor and start doing chins again if you got away from them. You should always do them first thing on back day. If you wait until you’ve already done even one or two other exercises first, your performance on chins will suffer greatly and you will likely get discouraged. They also make a perfect warm-up for all the heavier stuff like rows and deadlifts.
4. Realize That Width Alone Isn’t Enough
Many are under the false impression that width alone is the measure of a great back. If we lived in a two-dimensional reality, that might be true. But since we have three convenient dimensions, a back also needs to be thick, meaning inches of meat built up away from the spine. I also refer to this as part of “front-to-back thickness,” meaning you should see that thickness evident when turned sideways. Width comes long before thickness for most bodybuilders, and in fact a gifted bone structure with wide clavicles and narrow hips already imparts a certain degree of upper back width even with minimal development. Chin-ups and lat pulldowns will contribute to greater back width, but that prime real estate in back of you needs to be filled in with plenty of rows, deadlifts and rack pulls.
5. Do Non-supported Rows If You Can
Speaking of rows, you will get the most bang for your buck from the two most basic free-weight rows you can do, barbell rows and T-bar rows. The two greatest backs of our generation and perhaps of all time belonged to Mr. Olympia champions Dorian Yates and Ronnie Coleman. Dorian used the reverse-grip barbell row as his staple thickness movement and did controlled reps with 455 pounds in his prime years. Ronnie used 495 for barbell rows and piled on as many as 11 45-pound plates (495 again) for his T-bar rows with an Olympic bar jammed into a corner. These non-supported, freestanding free-weight rows seem to be the absolute most effective at increasing lat thickness, as they allow the greatest range of motion and also force you to fight to keep everything tight and maintain good posture and form.
6. Do Supported Rows If You Must
There are cases where you would be better served performing your rowing movements with the chest braced. The most compelling reason would be in the case of a lower back injury or a history of lower back injuries. Trying to maintain proper bent posture with a slight arch in the lower back becomes impossible when the lower back has been compromised by injuries. The resistance will naturally pull you forward and sooner or later the lower back rounds, putting you at tremendous risk for another lumbar mishap. The other instance where supported T-bar rows and various rowing machines like Hammer Strength or Arsenal Strength would come in handy would be for someone who simply can’t get the form down right on barbell or T-bars and finds themselves standing nearly upright, thus rendering the ROM far too short and effectively guaranteeing zero results. I would rather see someone using machines and activating his or her lats rather than struggle with awful form and never build a back.
7. Do at Least One Unilateral Row Every Workout
Achieving proper contractions for the lats is a challenge for most people, though it does seem that using one arm at a time helps tremendously. Most people find they can pull the weight just a bit further back using one arm also, and increased ROM is a benefit here. The king of unilateral movements is the one-arm dumbbell row, which is usually performed either with one leg up on a bench or squatting in front of a dumbbell rack, using the non-working arm to brace yourself. Since my lower back turned to glass a few years back, I do these facedown on an incline bench. There are also various plate-loading rowing machines that offer unilateral use, often with several grip options. And finally, the cable station can be used for one-arm rows, although the stronger among you may find the weight stacks insufficient for your powerful lats. I like to see back routines feature at least two rowing movements, one using both arms at once and another single-arm row.
8. Use Different Grips and Attachments
The back is such a large muscle complex that it’s exceedingly difficult to hit it from all angles in any one given workout without being there all day. If you have tried using different grip attachments for cable movements such as lat pulldowns and seated rows, you have probably noticed that each imparts a slightly different feel and seems to help you target areas like your mid or lower lats more effectively. For this reason, I encourage you to rotate various attachments and grips over the course of your workouts. Using the lat pulldown as an example, just with the standard bar attachment you can do the typical overhand grip just beyond shoulder width, or flip your hands over for reverse grip, spaced either at shoulder width or even closer. You can unclip that and attach pieces that allow for a neutral grip with both palms facing into the centerline of your body, either with a wider-spaced grip or else a version of the closer grip more often used for cable rows. You will note that many plate-loading rowing and pulldown machines provide several grip options as well. I do believe there is value, both physiologically and psychologically, in switching up your grips in your back training.
9. Stop the Low-rep Deadlifts
This last one is for you youngsters out there doing all your lifts in front of a tripod for the ‘gram. Muscles are stimulated to grow by being kept under tension for a certain amount of time – thus the term TUT, or time under tension. The optimal TUT has been translated into a repetition range. So, when you are told to do 10-12 reps for muscle hypertrophy, it’s the amount of time it takes to complete that many reps that’s the key, not the actual number or reps. Doing very low reps is excellent for increasing your strength, however it sucks at building muscle mass. Just as an example, I have known many guys who focused purely on getting stronger on squats and eventually could do a couple of reps with as much as 600-700 pounds. I’ve also known guys, and was one of those guys, who used squats more as a tool for building quadriceps mass and could do 10-20 reps with anywhere from 315 to 500 pounds. Those who did more reps with squats always had much bigger legs, even though the weights they used weren’t as heavy as what the guys out to build more power had on the bar. Deadlifts can do an incredible job at building a thicker back, but only if you stop stunting for social media and pull at least six to eight reps per set, and 10-12 would be even better.
You Know the Hacks, Now Get Your Back Jacked!
This hasn’t been a comprehensive back training dissertation, but we did go over some tremendously useful tips that can and will increase the productivity of your back workouts. Start applying them right away and I promise your back will start getting wider and thicker very soon!
Sample Back Workouts
Workout A
Chin-ups
4 x 10-12
Barbell Rows
4 x 10-12
Cable or Machine Pullovers
4 x 10-12
One-arm Dumbbell Rows
4 x 10-12, each arm
Rack Pulls
4 x 10-12
Workout B
Lat Pulldowns
4 x 12
T-Bar Rows
4 x 10-12
One-arm Machine Rows
4 x 10-12, each arm
Deadlifts
5 x 10
Ron Harris got his start in the bodybuilding industry during the eight years he worked in Los Angeles as Associate Producer for ESPN’s “American Muscle Magazine” show in the 1990s. Since 1992 he has published nearly 5,000 articles in bodybuilding and fitness magazines, making him the most prolific bodybuilding writer ever. Ron has been training since the age of 14 and competing as a bodybuilder since 1989. He lives with his wife and two children in the Boston area. Facebook Instagram
DISCUSS ON OUR FORUMS
SUBSCRIBE TO MD TODAY
GET OFFICIAL MD STUFF
VISIT OUR STORE
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER
ALSO, MAKE SURE TO FOLLOW US ON:
YOUTUBE
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