Name: Best Back Workout Video Ever (HIT EVERY MUSCLE!!)
Uploaded: 2016-08-01T07:36:35.000Z
Duration: 11 min 10 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

What's up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.

Future simple

Today we're going to do the definitive back training workout video for you. This is why:

Present continuous

because I'm breaking out four damned markers for you guys. As a matter of fact, it's a

whole new package of markers to make sure the - Jeff muscle markers – that you get

what we're talking about when it comes to back training.

Look, first and foremost, people don’t give the back the respect it deserves. Because

they can't see it they don’t want to train it. Those that are training a little bit more

seriously, of course you'll train your back, but as you'll see by the time this video's

done, there's a lot more going on in the back than the lats.

As a matter of fact, you can see, I've got a whole damned road map going on back here

and a lot of ink was used to make sure that we get you to understand that. So I'm going

to break it down muscle by muscle and tell you why you need to do certain things and

what the best exercises are to target those areas so you have a better understanding the

Okay, let's start with the lats. That's probably the one that you're, at least, training. So

what we want to do is look at the anatomy of the lats to better understand what they

do. They feed into the "X" in our back. Not just me. I'm not the only one that has an

X implanted in my back. It's actually something we all should strive for.

What that is, that's the lat, as it feeds down and in, and you'll have the X that kind

of goes like this in your back. It's the thoracic-lumbar fascia that the lats will feed into. We'll

talk about that muscle in a second. It feeds into it there, and then they fan up, and around.

Well, you want to make sure that you're pulling your arms down and into your sides, and we're

going to do that with exercises like pull ups, or as I'm showing you here, a lat pull

down. Why is it that you might feel it more, or at least more of a stretch when you're

doing an underhand lat pulldown, as I'm showing you here?

Well, look at the anatomy again. If I have my arms in front of my body like this, instantly

you see that I'm getting more stretch, more of a lengthening here of the lat as it reaches

all the way around the back, and up around here at the top. Whereas, if I put my arm

to the side here, I've just taken away all that extra stretch.

So you might feel it more by doing an underhand version of this. Both of them are ultimately

going to end down at your side, at peak contraction of the lats, but you're going to at least

have an understanding now, why one may feel better than the other. The next muscle group

we're going to attack – because it takes a huge portion, it covers a large area of

When you look at them they're big ass muscles. They're the ones over here taking up all this

space. They literally start at the base of your head, on the bump here on the back of

your head. They come all the way down your spine, they fan out here, they come back in,

and they actually have different purposes and different functions depending on the area

So you might have heard people talk about the upper traps, and you have people talking

about the lower traps. Well again, look at the direction of the fibers. The fibers of

the upper trap are coming down this way. So I always talk about one of the big flaws people

make when they train their traps, is to strictly just lift straight up and down. That's not

really training the lats the way that they actually have to be trained.

If you're taking into respect the orientation of the fibers going down this way, then you

actually want to be pulling up and at an angle. So I've actually developed the exercise here

that I showed you in a previous trap video, that actually does just that. Now, you don’t

have to use a band to do this. You could use a lower cable, weighted, heavy, and you can

pull at an angle up against that slope and then twist and turn because we're going to

get some of that retraction of the scapula as well.

So we're building into the major functions of the upper trap. The next thing we're going

to do is then look at the lower trap and these fibers are going to run up in this direction.

So what they do is, they actually stabilize down and back and hold your shoulder blades

in place, down and back. So we can actually attack them with an exercise like the inverted

Y. you take a light set of dumbbells – again, if you're not used to training these muscles

you're going to have to get used to it because you need to train all of them in order to

get your back to show the way it's supposed to.

You want to get your arms up and over your head, keeping your shoulder blades down and

back. Especially as you raise the weight up, it gets more challenging. Your shoulder blades

want to fly away. Keep the packed down and back and you'll hit both the upper and now

the lower traps. Next we have another one of those muscles that you probably don't really

think about that much, but if you want to have a complete back and a total back development

you'd better start. It's the terres major. Look, it's really close in proximity here

Guess why. Because they all have the same function as the lats. But there's one key

differentiator that you can do to target this a little bit more effectively. It's going

to be the width of the grip on a lat pull down. So you saw me do the lat pull down before.

I'm going to show it to you again here. You can see my grip here, the width of it is sort

If you want to start targeting and favoring a little bit more of the terres major then

you're going to widen that grip out, about as far as the bar will go. Perform the exercise

the same way, but you can see that you're getting more activation. You can actually

see that muscle contracting right here underneath that drawing I have. Obviously, it moves underneath

the pen, but you can see that area now, contracting a lot more.

That's the quickest and easiest way for you to start building this important area and

maybe feel that divot that you have in the back from ignoring it for so long. Next we're

going to talk about three muscles at once. People don’t even know that they're actually

separate muscles a lot of times. It's the rotator cuff. We're talking specifically about

the supraspinatus, the infraspinatus, and the terres minor.

Again, muscles that you never even think about training when it comes to back when you're

all focus on lats, lats, lats. But again, they're really important because they actually

fill in this space up here in your upper back, above and below the spine of your scapula.

That's where we get the supraspinatus and the infraspinatus. Obviously, the rotator

cuff is a very vulnerable group of muscles that become injured often in people that don't

That's a lot of us, but we can tell that if we give it some attention, it actually can

respond well and also complete that upper back development. Here's how to do it: you've

got to externally rotate your arm. If you're not externally rotating your arm in some exercise

then guess what; you are not training these muscles. There's no other way to train them.

All they do, for the most part, is externally rotate.

So they take your arm and they move it outward in the socket. So what we can do is we can

take an exercise like a W raise. All these exercises are ones that we actually program

in ATHLEANX because I know how important they are and how you need to make sure that you're

focusing on these. The W raise is one of them. You bend over like you're going to do a rear

delt raise, but from here we're actually going to rotate the arms backward.

I'm actually trying to, as you see me here, move my thumbs back behind my body. I'm not

just doing this. I'm doing this and this, externally rotating here at the shoulder so

that I'm getting a little bit of that rhomboid activation – which we're going to talk about

next – and also the external rotation. So I'm hitting all three of those muscles at