Troubleshoot Your Stubborn Lats with these Simple Training Tweaks

Don’t take this personally: but if you’re like the majority of people in the weightroom, your lats probably suck. Let’s not sugar coat it, it is what it is. When someone looks at you from the front and the back, oftentimes it’s like they’re seeing two different people.

It’s too bad because it doesn’t have to be that way. Even though you don’t see your back, others do. And when you well developed lats, it really separate the decent “fit bodies” from the “hardcore lifter ones.”

Having thick, hanging lats is not merely about looking jacked from all angles. Far from it!

1. Big lats make you look wider, even from the front. You know about those dudes who flare out their inexistent lats to appear wider (called imaginary lats syndrome, or walking like you are holding two gallons of water under your armpits). Well imagine how much wider you’ll look if you actually have lats!
2. Well-developed latissimus dorsi muscles help you achieve that aesthetic V-shape.
3. To quote the late powerlifting guru, Louie Simmons: “A strong person is strong in the back of his body.” In that sense, having a great back and lats will make you stronger everywhere.
4. The bench, deadlift, pullups, chinups, rows, power clean, power snatch and even military press are all improved (and made safer) if you have strong lats. Either by being a prime mover, by stabilizing the body or by creating a stronger foundation to lift from.
5. Here’s a little-known fact: If the weak point of your bench press is at the bottom of the movement, chances are it’s due to having weak lats.
6. When it comes to the deadlift most people who round their back do so not because of a weak core or lower back, but because they cannot lock-in their lats. When your lats are locked in, it’s almost impossible to round the lower back and the bar stay closer to you, making the lift safer and more efficient.

If you want to lift big, not get injured or look great, you must have those lats.

Yet, few people do.

Let’s take care of that with these small but invaluable form fixes that will allow your lats to grow without you having to completely overhaul your routine or use some sort of specialization approach or complex methods.

Having bigger, stronger lats comes down to three simple rules:

1. The path of the elbows
2. F.A.R.T.
3. Body position

Path of the Elbows

Ray Mentzer (training partner and brother to bodybuilding icon Mike Mentzer) used to say that pressing and pulling is all about the elbows. And he was 100% correct!

Pretty much every pulling exercise can favor either the upper back (mid traps, rhomboids, rear delts) or the lats, depending on what happens with the elbows. If your lats are poor, chances are that you are doing all your pulling exercises in a way that they emphasize the upper back and thus under stimulate the lats.

Let me know if this sounds familiar: “To really hit that back, you must focus on squeezing the shoulder blades together” (or a cue like: Try to pinch my finger with your shoulder blades).

It should be familiar because it’s the most common cue when doing a pulling exercise. And if your goal is to target the upper back, then it’s the right cue.

However, doing this will actually decrease lats activation.

And from working in gyms for over 25 years I noticed that people use this technique even on exercises supposed to hit the lats, essentially turning it into another upper back movement.

Why? Because it’s much easier to “feel” the upper back than lats. When you focus on squeezing the shoulder blades it’s easier to feel like it’s working (even if it’s working the wrong region) and people stick to that.

You can essentially turn any pulling exercise into a more lats dominant movement, simply by changing the pulling-path slightly.

Focus on the upper back

Path we are shooting for: Bringing the elbow behind the mid-line of the body (pulling backward)

Cue: Squeeze the shoulder blades together, or bring the elbow far back

To focus more on the lats

Path we are shooting for: Pulling your elbows toward your hip joint (not going behind your body)

Cue: Elbows to the hips, or move your shoulder away from your ear (downward)

Whether you are doing a lat pulldown, seated row, dumbbell row, etc, these rules apply and you can positively bias either your lats or upper back.

FART

Stop giggling—it’s not what you originally thought it meant. This acronym was first coined by bodybuilding coach Mike Van Wyck. It means:

Full

Active

Range

Tension

That refers to the fullest range of motion in which the target muscle is producing a high level of tension. This is not the same thing as full range of motion.  That refers to the longest amplitude you can reach on an exercise regardless of if you lose tension in some parts or not.

Here is a simple example. When you perform a dumbbell lateral raise (for your delts), there is essentially no tension on your muscles during the initial 15 degrees of movement (arms to your side to 1/8^th of the way up) . After that initial underloaded portion, however, the tension ramps up rapidly.

A full range of motion rep would start with your arms tucked to your sides, or in front of you with both DBs touching each other).

But in a F.A.R.T. rep, you’d start each rep a few inches away from your body, so you already have tension when you begin your rep.

Those ranges of motion where tension/resistance goes down can have two major impact on limiting the effectiveness of your set.

1. On some exercises, that unloaded range allows you to create momentum (because the resistance is so low). That momentum then reduces the amount of tension you need to produce to finish the rep, making it a lot less effective.
2. On some other exercises, that zone where the target muscle cannot produce a high level of tension allows other muscles to take over and it then become harder to focus on the target muscle. Remember this: The muscle that fires first tend to do most of the work.

With lats, that second factor is the most common. Especially on lat pulldown variations.

People like to overstretch the lats at the top, believing that this stretch gives them more growth. But not all muscles respond well to stretch-induced hypertrophy. In the case of the lats, if you overstretch them on a pulldown, they lose their capacity to produce tension. That’s when rear delts or arms will take over. And if you have poor lats development, you are probably not good at creating lats tension. When you lose it at the top, it will be almost impossible to establish it.

In the case of your pulldown exercises you don’t want to cut the movement short, but you don’t want to overstretch either: don’t let the shoulder travel upward more than a natural position, then focus on initiating the pull by bringing your shoulder down, then elbow toward your hip (not behind).

Body Position

Yes, I did say that you can bias every pulling exercise either toward the lats or upper back. But some positions make it easier to hit the upper back while others will facilitate recruiting the lats.

Let’s look at the two most common position for pulling exercises:

1. Pulling a resistance from up to down (lat pulldown, pull ups)
2. Pulling a resistance from in front of you toward your body (seated row, barbell or DB row)

Group A does favor hitting the lats. But you can ruin that advantage by setting up wrong:

In a vertical pull (Group A)

• To bias the lats: keep your torso as upright as possible, arch your lower back while keeping the torso perpendicular to the floor. Then, remember to pull your elbows to your hips, not behind you.
• To bias the upper back: Lean back around 30 degrees, then pull your elbows behind your body, squeezing the shoulder blades (this essentially turns the lat pulldown into a seated row). (Note: I rarely recommend doing this.)

In a horizontal pull (Group B)

• To bias the lats as much as possible: lean forward as far as you can when doing your seated row and pull toward your hips (this is often called a motorcycle row). This basically turn a seated row into a lat pulldown. Which is not necessary if you do your lats pulldown properly.
• To bias the lats: Sit at a 90-degree angle (torso perpendicular to the floor) then pull the elbows to the hips, not pulling until they are behind your body. BONUS: If you have a seated row station in which you can change the height of the pulley, bring the pulley to eyes level and then pull to your hips. That downward angle will hit the lats even more.
• To bias the upper back: Sit with a slight backward lean (15 ish degrees) and pull straight back until the elbows are behind your body (squeeze your shoulder blades together.
• If you are using a seated row machine, the same rules apply.

Seated row machine

• To bias the lats: Get you chest on the support pad and sit as far back as possible on the bench (the goal is your have your torso leaning slightly forward, shoulders in front, hips back) and arch your lower back.
• To bias the upper back: Get your chest on the support pad and hips directly under your chest (so you are more upright). When you pull, imagine lifting your chest up (you can even lean back very slightly).

Tips

If you apply the information above, it will be very easy to target your lats and make them grow

But here are few quickies you can add for some added benefits:

• Do your pulling exercises unilaterally (one side at a time). This makes it easier to send a strong activation signal to the working limbs, facilitating the recruitment of the growth-prone fast twitch fibers.
• Start your back workout with straight-arm pulldowns or a pullover machine. These ae great to learn to contract your lats.
• Keep the weight lighter and the reps higher until you become good at contracting your lats. You can get the same muscle growth from lighter work, as long as you train close to failure. But when you go heavy, your body will have the tendency to rely on its strength. So you will more easily compensate with other muscles than the lats. With a lighter weight (e.g. something you can do for 12 reps) it is easier to prevent compensation. Once you are efficient, move on to heavier loads (5-8 reps).
• Hold the peak contraction 2 sec per rep. This will not give you significantly more hypertrophy from your set, but it will speed up the motor learning of maximally contracting your lats. When one of your muscle groups suck even though you are training it, it is often because of poor recruitment of that muscle. Strategies improving muscle control can be an investment in long-term gain. Of course, once you are efficient at contracting your lats, stop doing the pause as it will reduce the load you can use.
• Hit your lats twice per week. Again, this is a motor learning thing. If you practice contracting a muscle more often, you’ll become better at recruiting it faster. One thing I like to do with clients with lagging lats is doing 4-6 weeks where we have one “lats day” where all we do its lats. And then we have a regular back day (3-4 days later) in which we hit the whole back, including some lats work.

CONCLUSION

The only thing that I’ll add is that fixing a lagging muscle takes time. After all, in the best possible situation, a natural lifter can hope to build 0.5-1lb of muscle tissue per month on their whole body. So don’t expect 5lbs of lats beef gained in a month. From experience, you can start to see visual changes after 3-4 weeks and it takes about 12 weeks to make a big difference.

But if you stick with it, it will work!