The ONLY 2 Exercises You Need For A Thicker Back

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Try 2 weeks free of a personalized fitness program built for your body: https://bws.plus/_d1 Did you know there are 6 key muscles responsible for back thickness? But each one has a unique function that most people’s back workouts overlook. I know because after years of doing the “best” back thickness exercises in my back training, my back still looked flat. But once I learned how to properly target these muscles, my back thickness and definition completely transformed. It even improved my posture. Today, I’ll break down the only 2 exercises you need in your back thickness workout — plus an underrated technique that can help you build the kind of back most guys never achieve. Click below to subscribe for more videos: https://www.youtube.com/jeremyethier/?sub_confirmation=1 The first of our thick back exercises will focus on the mid and lower traps, rhomboids, and teres muscles. Usually, people will use a wide-grip barbell or Pendlay rows. While these can build an impressive back, they demand a lot from your lower back for stability. Plus, if you’ve got a longer torso like me, the increased lever makes the movement more fatiguing, especially as you get stronger. Nowadays, I’ve seen better results by training my lower back separately and isolating my mid and upper back with a stabilized low-to-high row. There are 2 things you need to get right for back thickness. First is the arm path. The sweet spot for this thick back exercise is right around 45 degrees. Next, you want to set up your pulling angle. And to hit more of the upper back muscles, you’ll want a row that goes from low to high. If you’re using a fixed pulley like me, you can replicate this by bracing your core and then leaning back slightly. You can see now how the pulling angle is as if the cable were set lower. However, you don’t want to lean back too far as this will start hitting the muscles we’ll use in the second of our thick back exercises. Once you get the angle right, lock your torso and don’t let it move. One mistake you need to fix in your back training? The “arm pulling mistake”. You can tell if you’re an arm puller when you row if your arms move but your shoulders stay in the same position or end up rolling forward. To fix this, understand that the main role of the muscles we’re trying to hit in these thick back exercises is retraction. So, to get them to do that when you row, let them open up fully at the start of each rep. Then, start the rep by thinking about pulling back and out with your elbows, and then keep pulling back as far as you can. A cue that might also help is think about opening and pulling your chest toward the bar, as if you were doing an inverted row. Don’t have cables? First, set an incline bench to about 30 degrees, usually 2 to 3 notches up from the bottom. Lay your chest on it and hang your arms down. From here, pull your elbows back in that arrow shape I mentioned earlier. Have longer arms or find this awkward with your elbows against the bench? You can do a single-arm version by bending over with a side stance and supporting one hand on an incline bench. Just keep your body angled up slightly to replicate that low-to-high pulling motion, then simply pull your elbow back while keeping it angled out. But although this first move is great for building thickness in your mid-back, we need a second exercise in our back workout to make sure your upper back muscles don’t get left behind. The upper fibers of the traps lift the shoulder blade in what’s called elevation. So we still want to do a row, but one that involves more of an upward “shrug” motion. Now, you can simply perform the cable row from Exercise 1, but with a steeper lean back. A better option, though, is to use the same bench and dumbbell setup from earlier, but this time, use a higher angle. Around 60 degrees, which is usually 2 to 3 notches down from the top position. While standing, set your chest on the bench, then pull your elbows back—but this time, keep them flared out wider than we did in Exercise 1. It’s not quite an upright row; it’s essentially a very low-to-high row with the elbows going up and back. Think about rowing back while shrugging your shoulders up. But even with these 2 thick back exercises in your back thickness workout, your back won’t grow as fast as it could without this bonus technique. For the first of our 2 thick back exercises, after you can’t do any more full reps, take your back to true failure by keeping your arms straight and focusing on simply opening up your shoulder blades, then using your mid-back muscles to squeeze them together. You should be able to bang out at least 4 or 5 reps like this. For the second of our thick back exercises, do the same thing, but this time focus more on “shrugging” the weight up using your upper traps. I personally do this after every set, but start by trying it on your last set or doing a 4th set where you focus solely on this motion, and consider ramping it up from there.