Pumping Iron

Chin ups and pull ups are my favourite back exercises. However, sometimes a change is a good thing. I’ve found a common complaint is that people say they don’t feel their backs working with chin ups and pull ups for a number of reasons. There are some really great pieces of advice on how to increase your mind-muscle connection on the forum. Here are Defiant1’s tips in response to a trainee who says he feel his biceps and forearms more than his lats when doing chin ups: http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showpost.php?p=34362871&postcount=3

While pull ups, chin ups, pulldowns and rows are staples in my training, for a change of pace I like to include the following exercises.

Lat Shrugs

Hang under a pull up bar or pulldown machine (bar/grip of your choice to hit different areas of the lats) and “shrug up”. Imagine pulling the bar down without bending your arms or performing a reverse shrug. Your shoulder blades will go downwards.

This exercise can also be done from dip bars. Put extra padding on the dip bars with towels. Balance yourself over the bars by putting your upper forearms on the bars. Sink your body down with your forearms in front of you then pull yourself back up purely by lat contraction. DiamondDelts demonstrates in the photos below.

Rearward Shrugs

This is a trap/rhomboid exercise where you lay face down on a raised bench with a barbell or pair of dumbbells beneath you. You shrug back the weight without bending your arms. You can also perform this on a row machine. You need to raise the bench if you use freeweights otherwise you won’t be able to straighten your arms. You can use step aerobic steps, blocks of wood or 45lb plates.

Pulldowns with arm straps

Get a pair of arm straps that are commonly used for hanging leg raises / knee ups like these on sale on this website: http://www.bodybuilding.com/store/pgrip/hang.html. Attach them to a pull up bar or pulldown machine and perform pulldowns by pushing down with your elbows/back of your arms and NOT by pulling with your hands. Keep your palms open and not grasping the straps.

Rows with arm straps

Same as above but attach the arm straps to a low cable for rows or a barbell for bent over rows.  Again, very important not to grasp the straps with your hands. The range of motion will be less than regular rows otherwise the straps will slip off your arms.

Here are some related discussions from the forum:

Here are some discussions on them from the forum:
http://forum.bodybuilding.com/search.php?searchid=95856241&pp=20
http://forum.bodybuilding.com/search.php?searchid=95855811

Note that not everyone uses uniform terminology. Where I have called each exercise a different name some people in the linked forum posts call all of the above exercises lat shrugs. Don’t let it confuse you!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 3:42 am and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.