#005 Your guide to training back

Before we dive into today’s topic of how to build an impressive back, I wanted to quickly reflect on the last month. Roughly 30 days ago, I started the Boats & Logs Lifting Club to offer you long-form knowledge beyond Instagram Reels. Now, only one month later, we are already a community of well above 550 subscribers on top of the 59k followers on Instagram. Thank you so much for all your support.

Enough off-topic talk; let’s start with today’s topic:

Understanding Back Anatomy

Before we move into how we train our back, let’s take a brief moment to understand WHAT we are actually training when we are talking about training back. The back is a very complex muscle group with many joints, strings, and muscles. For training, we will focus on the major muscles shown below:

In the following segments, we will mostly talk about the two major muscles you can see here. The Latissimus Dorsi (short “Lats”) and the Trapezius (short “Traps”). The Rhombid and Teres are trained as a by-product of working out the lats and traps. The Rear Delt is part of the shoulder, which we will cover in a few weeks.

The Latissimus Dorsi is the muscle that will give the back the V-shape many desire. When talking about training for width, we mainly mean training the Latissimus Dorsi.

The muscle has two main functions: Shoulder extension and shoulder adduction. You can test this out by moving your arm from a hanging position up until it is in a horizontal position with the shoulder and back down again. If you place your other hand on the muscle, you can feel the lats engaging. The Latissimus Dorsi’s muscle fibers start from the spin and then go upwards - they (mostly) run vertically along your body. Let’s keep this in mind for later when we are discussing how to train the muscle best.

But there is also another really important muscle for an appealing back physique: The Trapezius. While the Latissimus Dorsi benefits your back width, the Trapezius is mainly responsible for back thickness.

The Traps have different functions depending on whether we are using the upper, middle, or lower Traps. But its main function is elevating and retracting the shoulder blade. Again, we will come back to this when we are talking about training for thickness. We don’t need to worry about the Rhomboid Major, as it will be trained as a byproduct of training the Traps.

Developing your back will not only give you a more impressive physique, but it is also the most important muscle group to prevent common modern-day injuries, which are often caused by bad posture and lack of back muscles and, from there, spread through the whole body.

Training for Width/Latissimus Dorsi

To train back width, you need to target the Latissimus Dorsi. Remember, the muscle fibers of the Lats run mostly vertically along your body. Therefore, we can achieve the best recruitment of all muscle fibers by doing vertical pulls to work the full range of motion.

Common vertical pull exercises are the lat pulldown or a pull-up. Which one you choose doesn’t matter much. Pick the exercise that’s the most fun for you and where you can feel the best contraction of the Lats.

A benefit of the pulldown is that you can change the weight according to your needs. Beginners can struggle to get in enough reps with pull-ups, so pulldowns might be a good place to start. Pull-ups, on the other hand, can benefit you by engaging the biceps more than the pulldown does.

Whether you are doing pull-ups or pulldowns, you should train with a shoulder-width (to 1.5x shoulder-width) overhand grip for the best results.

Oftentimes, newer lifters have problems in targeting the Latissimus Dorsi properly. To avoid that, it is important to build a proper mind-muscle connection. Here are a few tips:

1. Learn to engage the Lats. A good way to start is flexing the muscle at home. By doing that, you learn how to engage the muscle, making it easier to target it during your workouts.

2. Warm up the muscle properly so you have already engaged it a few times before you start your working sets. This makes it easier for you to target the muscle.

3. Focus on using only the Lats during the exercise. Try to establish a strong mind-muscle connection to only work the muscle and not involve the arms and rest of the back.

4. Use lighter weight. An easy trap to fall into is overloading the weight and then using your arms and the rest of the back to pull the weight. Instead, try lowering the weight a bit and, as described in #3, only pull from the lat. You should, of course, still train until (near) failure.

Training for Thickness/Trapezius

Training and developing your Trapezius is how you can achieve a thick back. To determine how we can train the muscle best, let’s quickly remember that the muscle’s main function is elevating and retracting the shoulder blades.

We mainly want to focus on the retracting part. To feel the muscle, sit up straight and pull your shoulder blades back. You have just engaged the muscle! Consequently, when we needed vertical pulls for back-width, we now need horizontal pulls for back-thickness.