How to use your lats instead of your biceps in back exercises
Here is the question: when you do exercises like bent-over barbell rows, bent-over dumbbell rows, various other rows, and pull-ups with an underhand or overhand grip, are you actually using your lats on those pulling movements?
Do you feel like you’re really pulling with your back, or is your back the last thing that actually gets the set done?
If you feel your back working, everything is fine!
But if you don’t feel your back on pulling exercises, you’re in good company, because many people have the same problem: in back exercises, you’re using your biceps far too much instead of your lats!
How can that be?
At first glance it seems a little odd that an exercise meant for one muscle ends up being done by a different muscle altogether. But once you understand a little of the biomechanics of back exercises and how the body functions, you’ll admit that it is indeed possible and quite common.
Back exercises are, by nature, pulling movements: during them we pull something toward ourselves, either horizontally (rows) or vertically (pull-ups, top to bottom). In pulling exercises, the biceps are always recruited to a lesser or greater degree. That means it is practically impossible to perform any pulling exercise in a way that leaves the biceps out. It makes no difference whether it’s a row or some vertical pull.
As far as the biceps themselves are concerned, this is good in a way, because that muscle almost always gets some training load in practically every heavy back exercise.
The problem is rather when the biceps start doing most of the work in back exercises. In many cases people even pull in such a way that the biceps do all of the work. When that happens, the back is left largely untrained, if not entirely.
What causes this?
This tendency has very clear causes. Based on my experience, three main factors stand out:
- The weight you’re using is too heavy.
- You simply don’t feel your lats and don’t know how to pull with your back instead of your arms.
- A combination of the previous two.
Solutions
The weight is too heavy…
Walk into any gym and you’ll always find people using weights that are clearly too heavy for them. Mostly, this is actually more of a men’s problem. You know how it goes: the more weight on the bar, the more you stand out to your friends, your girlfriend or the girl on the next machine. Or people are simply feeding their own EGO.
Whatever the reason for using excessive weights, it doesn’t make sense. One reason is that with a weight that’s too heavy, you can’t train the muscle, or muscle group, that the exercise is actually meant for.
And when it comes to back exercises, if you try to pull a weight that’s beyond your strength, you’re no longer pulling with your back but with everything else. You’ve surely seen how people “jerk” on rows, using the momentum of the whole body to swing the weight up, and a large part of the pull is actually done by the biceps.
And even if that “jerk” isn’t used, the weight, whether bar or handle, doesn’t reach where it should at the end of the movement. That still means the weight is too heavy and you can’t perform repetitions with a proper range of motion. People either don’t pull all the way, don’t stretch fully, or do repetitions with both flaws.
In most back exercises, you should stretch in the lowering phase until your arms are almost straight. That applies to both rows and vertical pulls.
The best way to test whether your weight is appropriate is to hold the maximum contraction at the end of each repetition for about 1 – 2 seconds. If you can’t get through a set with one-second peak-contraction pauses, the weight is too heavy for you.
There is only one solution to this problem: reduce the weight and do the set with proper technique.
If you don’t know how to use your back muscles on pulls…
It’s also possible that the weight is ideal for you, but you simply don’t know how to pull with your back. This situation is quite common, and it comes mainly from the fact that your back is literally “behind you”, so you can’t see that muscle working the way you can with, for example, your chest or biceps.
This is where it’s important to think about the muscle you intend to do the exercise with. The so-called “mind – muscle connection” and developing it so you can feel your muscles during repetitions is a necessary and extremely important skill.
How to pull with your back instead of your arms and feel your lats
Don’t pull the weight “into” yourself…
When we grab any handle to pull it toward us, we tend to start pulling it into our “body,” or toward the center of the body. Unfortunately, this habit is the first step that shifts the main load of the pull from your back to your biceps. That’s the first thing to change. How?
Don’t pull with your hands…
That sounds odd, doesn’t it. You take hold of a bar or handle, you’re about to start pulling, and I’m asking you to do it “without your hands.” It will make sense in a moment. The problem is that, once again, because we see our hands in front of us and they are the ones gripping the equipment, we automatically tend to work with what we see. When you pull the weight with your hands, you pull it mostly with your biceps, not your back. You should pull in a way that your hands do no work. How?
Think of your hands, or rather your forearms, as simply “hooks” or “links” that connect your elbows to the handle or the weight being pulled.
You have to imagine that, when pulling, you need your hands only to hold on to the handle. You must avoid pulling directly with the muscles of your arms. Why? Because…
You need to pull with your elbows…
This is the key tip that helps ensure you pull with your back rather than your biceps. Instead of pulling the weight, i.e. the handle, toward yourself, try to focus on your elbows as you pull and drive them from your sides to behind your back. Imagine someone standing behind you and you want to touch them with your elbows. Your goal is to touch them. And because your hands are shackled to the handle or the weight, when you pull your elbows back, the weight being pulled “inevitably” moves along with them.
With pull-ups and behind-the-neck pulldowns, the only difference compared with rows is that on vertical pulls you try to drive your elbows from the top down to your sides, while on rows you bring your elbows from the front to the back. Either way, getting a feel for the lats comes down to pulling with your elbows. When you reach the maximal range of motion, feel the peak contraction for a second.
Overhand and neutral grips can even be better than underhand…
The last tip I want to mention concerns grip: in back exercises, underhand pulls also put the biceps to work more than usual. With overhand and neutral grips, i.e. palms facing each other, the biceps is always somewhat less involved. Don’t get me wrong, the biceps still works with neutral and overhand grips, but to a slightly lesser extent than with underhand pulls. The main thing is still that you try to pull with your elbows, not your hands, and bring your elbows from your sides to the back rather than “pulling into yourself.”
Final word…
So, if you have trouble feeling your back when pulling: use a weight you can manage, so that you can maintain technique and the maximal range of motion, and pull the weight not with your arms, i.e. your forearms or hands, but with your elbows.
If you do this, you’ll start feeling your back when pulling too!
Original article here.
Author: Janar Rückenberg (translation)
Come and train! ArtGym
