Weight Training Advice
Lat Workouts
smaller by comparison. Training your shoulders and upper back will make you wider. For the upper back, training the letissmus dorsi, or lats, will help you increase your upper body width. Lat workouts must be done to build these muscles.
The lats are the large wing shaped muscles on the sides of the upper back. If they're well developed, they will add a lot of width to your upper body. You need to do your lat workouts as part of your upper back weight training routine.
The best exercise to do as part of a lat workout is the pull-up. They will directly target the lats better than any other exercise. You do them by gripping a fixed bar overhead and pulling your weight up until your upper chest touches the bar. You can do them with a close, medium, or grip. You should vary your grip range for pull-ups to get the most out your training. You should be able to do more close grip pull-ups with an underhand grip than other kinds of pull-ups.
The biggest problem with performing pull-ups as part of your lat workouts is that it can be tough to do very many, or sometimes any, of them if you aren't strong enough to get your chin/upper chest up to the bar. This happens to a lot of people. Even if you are muscular you might have a tough time getting your body's weight up, especially with wide grip pull-ups. If you have this problem, many gyms have assisting pull-ups machines that let you put your knees on a pad with weight that help push you up as you do pull-ups during your lat workouts.
By contrast, you could be very strong at pull-ups with the ability to do a lot of them. To build more muscle size in the lats, you can wear a belt that allows you to add extra weight to it for more resistance.
If you can't do enough pull-up reps to get a good set and don't have access to an assisting pull-up machine, you should make cable pulldowns a part of your lat workouts.Cable pulldowns aren't as efficient an exercise as pull-ups are, but they will do the job. You can perform pulldowns with all of the same grip ranges to changes the angles from which you are lifting during your lat workouts. It's best to pull the bar down to your upper chest area and flex your lats.
Row exercises will help build thickness throughout your upper back, including your lats. One great exercise to do during lat workouts to build thickness in them is the bent over row with an underhand grip. You'll feel this exercise more in your latissmus dorsi muscles than the other upper back muscles. This exercise was a favorite of former Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates, who possessed one of widest and thickest backs in bodybuilding history.
There are various weight training machines that you can use as part of a lat workout. However, they force you to pull the weight in a fixed plane, which isn't as good for your muscle building efforts as using free weights and cables are.
If you're trying to build a muscular physique through weight training, building upper body width is essential. Not only will you look bigger if you gain width, your midsection will also appear
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