Pull-up And Pulldown Tips
Weight Training Advice
best exercises for building the lats are pull-ups and cable pulldowns.
Pull-ups are better than cable pulldowns for building upper back width because they involve moving your body through space. This makes it a tougher exercise to perform and will involve many smaller stabilizing muscles.
The best ways to do pull-ups are with a close grip with your palms facing you or with a wide grip with your palms facing away from you. For variety you can try other hand placements. Having your palms facing you when you do close grip pull-ups will allow you to get a nice stretch at the beginning of a rep and your biceps to help you get all of the way up.
When you do a pull-up rep you'll want to try to pull up until your upper chest touches the bar to get a full contraction in the lats. This can be tough to do, but if you can do a few reps where you get your upper chest to the bar you can continue with some reps where you get you chin to the bar. If you want you can rep out until you can hardly pull yourself up at all. When you do pull-ups you should also avoid lifting your legs to try to kick your way up. Of course, if you do some good, full reps it's okay to break your form a bit to get a couple of extra reps.
The one downside to doing pull-ups is the possibility that you may not be able to get very many reps if you haven't built up enough strength in your lats and other upper back muscles. You may have strong lat and upper back muscles and still have a tough time doing enough pull-ups for a good set if you are too heavy. Even if you are all muscle this extra body weight will affect how many pull-ups you can do. To combat this you can have somebody assist you by lifting your lower legs or waist so you get full pull-up reps. Nowadays, many gyms have assisted pull-up machines that allow you to put your knees on a pad and add some weight to help you get all the way up. If you have very strong upper back muscles and can do a lot of pull-ups you can use a belt that you can add weights to for more resistance.
Cable pulldowns are a great alternative to pull-ups if you have a tough time getting enough pull-up reps. You can use all of the same grip ranges with cable pulldowns and aren't forced to use your own body weight. Cable pulldown machines also allow you to attach many different bars and handles to get some variety in your upper back and lat workouts. Close-grip and wide grip, palms facing each other grips are 2 ways you can do cable pulldowns that you may not be able to with pull-ups.
There is some speculation as to which grip range, close or wide, is better for adding width to the lats. Some think that close grips allow for a fuller contraction while others believe that wide grips will help pull the shoulder blades apart and hit the outer lats harder for more added upper back width. It's best to do sets of pull-ups and/or cable pulldowns with both grips to get the best of both worlds and the most possible upper back muscular development.
Increasing upper back width is very important to building a muscular physique. The key to a wider back is to build and add width to the latissimus dorsi muscles (lats) that are located on each side of the upper back. The
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