Upper Back Exercises
Weight Training Advice
weight training, you still need to do focus on performing upper back exercises with enough intensity to add the size you're looking for. Any major imbalance between the muscle size of the pectorals and the upper back may adversely affect your posture as well.
When you do upper back exercises you need to focus on gaining both width and thickness. For more upper back width you need to do exercises that target the latismuss dorsi muscles. To gain thickness you need to do upper back exercises that will thicken the muscles between the lats, as well as the lats themselves.
To gain upper back width the best kind of exercises are pull-ups and cable pulldowns. These upper back exercises allow you a lot of variety in how you grip the bar, and to get the most out of them you'll want to do them with both a close grip and wide grip with some sets of in between grips for even more variety. While wider grip pull-ups and cable pulldowns will allow you to get a great stretch in the lats and help pull the scapula out for even more width, close grip ones will help build some lat thickness along with width and give you a different kind of stretch. Since you'll be able to use more weight on close grip upper back pull up and pulldown exercises you're probably better off doing them before wide grip ones.
Whenever possible you should try to do pull-ups rather than cable pulldowns because moving your body through space makes it a superior exercise. If you have trouble doing enough pull up reps you can use an assisted pull-up machine found at many gyms. Contrastly, if you're very strong on pull-ups you can use a belt that allows you to add weights to it for added resistence.
To build more upper back thickness you'll need to do some forms of row exercises. You can do rowing upper back exercises with free weights, cables, and various machines. You can also use many different grips ranges on row exercises.
Bent over barbell rows with either an overhand or underhand grip are the best for building thickness through the upper back area. When you do bent over rows keep your upper body at around a 45 degree angle instead of parallel to the floor and keep your lower back arched rather than actually bent. It's important not to overtax your lower back when doing rows.
Dumbbell rows done one side at a time are another one of the top upper back exercises for building thickness.
Cable rows allow for a lot of grip variety so you may want to do barbell rows with a normal grip and use the cable rows for close and wide grip rowing.
Straight arm pullovers done with a cable can be a great upper back exercise as long as you make sure to contract your back muscles at the bottom of a rep.
Getting a strong contraction on all of your reps is very important to building the muscles of the upper back. When you do pull-ups try to pull up until your upper chest touches the bar, and when you can't do any more reps to the chest do some to the neck. Do the same thing when your pulling down on cable pulldowns. When you do rowing upper back exercises try to pull the weight all the way to your abdomen or lower chest area and make sure you can feel the resistence.
If you combine all of the individual muscles of the upper back, they make up the largest muscle group of the body. While you can't see the upper back muscles working while you target them through
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