Weight Training Tips and Articles

Building Upper Back Thickness

  The upper back contains many muscles and if you put them together it makes it the largest muscle group of the body. For many weight trainers it’s a pain to train the upper back since you can’t see the muscles working and all of the exercises for it involv pulling rather than pushing. However, for anyone who wants more overall muscularity and strength building thickness in the upper back must be done. You also don’t want very developed pecs and an average upper back as it may negatively affect your posture.

  The best exercises for building upper back thickness are rows. They can be done many different ways - with barbells, dumbbells, cables, or machines. The good old bent over barbell row is great for thickening the upper back. When you do them you should have your body at around a 45 degree angle to the floor with your lower back arched rather than having your upper body parellel to the floor with your back bent. Focus on contracting the muscles of the upper back for a second or 2 when you pull the barbell to your abdomen area. Another great trick to use on barbell rows is to do them with an underhand grip. This will help you build thicker lats (former Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates used this exercise and he had some of the thickest lat muscles ever seen).

  Another great way to use a barbell for rowing is to do t-bar rows. To do them put a barbell on the floor and load weights on only one end of it, then bend over and put both hands close to the end where the weight is and pull it to your chest/abdomen area. Try it to work the upper back muscles from  different angle.

  Dumbbell rows will allow you to train one side of your upper back at a time. Use a bench to support the side that isn’t lifting and pull the dumbbell from the floor up to the side of your body.

  While free weight rowing is superior for building more upper back thickness, cable rows certainly have their place. You can do them towards the end of an upper back workouts or even use them as your primary rowing exercise if you’ve lifted for a while and have already built up a lot of muscle in your upper back. Rowing on a cable machine will allow you to try different grip ranges to hit the upper back from different angles.

Lower Back Workouts

  Any serious weight trainer needs to perform lower back workouts regularly to avoid injuries and lift more on weight training exercises for other muscles. A weak lower back will negatively affect you on many major exercises, deadlifts and squats in particular. If you don’t have a strong lower back you will also be way more likely to hurt yourself lifting, even if you aren’t using much weight.

  The best weight training exercise to strengthen the lower back muscles is the deadlift. You should always start a lower back workout with them. Good mornings are a rarely used exercise for the lower back but is a good one to do after deadlifting. Hyperextensions should be done for high reps with no or little weight and are a great finisher to a lower back workout.

  Try a workout like this to build muscle and strength in your lower back:

Deadlifts (1 or 2 sets of 12-15 reps on light day, 2 or 3 sets of 8-12 reps on medium day, 3 or 4 sets of 3-8 reps on heavy day)

Good mornings (1 or 2 sets of 15-20 reps on light day, 2 sets of 10-15 reps on medium day, 2 or 3 sets of 5-10 reps on heavy day)

Hyperextensions (1 or 2 sets of 20-30 reps during each lower back workout to finish off with).

  This workout should allow you to strengthen your lower back without overtraining as long as you get enough rest between workouts. You may want to try your deadlift one rep max every now and then on your heavy day to test your strength.

Building Upper Back Width

  If you’re trying to build a muscular physique through weight training it’s very important to create a wider appearance in your upper body. Doing this will give you a classic Herculean look and create an illusion of a smaller waist even if you haven’t actually decreased the size of it.

  One way to increase your upper body width is to build the latissmus dorsi muscles of the upper back. The lats are the large wing-shaped muscles of the upper back and building them will help make you look wider.

  The best exercises for building wider lats are pull-ups and cable pulldowns. Pull-ups are a superior exercise to cable pulldowns because you’re moving your body through space when you do them, but many weight trainers may not be able to do enough pull-ups for an effective set if they weigh too much or haven’t built up enough strength so the pulldowns are a great alternative to building a wider upper back. If you want to do pull-ups but can’t do too many reps, there are alot of gyms that have assisted pull-up machines that will allow you to get enough reps to build the lats.

  Whether you do pull-ups or cable pulldowns you should vary your grip to get the most muscle growth possible. Close grip pull-ups and pulldowns with an underhand grip will give you a nice contraction when the bar is at your chest, while wide grip pull-ups and pulldowns with an overhand grip will give your lats a nice stretch to start off a rep. To get the best overall upper back development you should include both close grip and wide grip pull-up and cable pulldowns. You can also experiment with other grip ranges if you’d like.

  When you do pull-up and pulldowns exercises you should always do them to your chest or neck. Pull-ups and pulldowns to behind the neck put your shoulders in a precarious position which may cause an injury.