Back training – unsuccessful strategies
Sometimes the most important thing is to figure out what not to do. If you want to develop powerful lats and traps that make you jealous, avoid the four fallacious back training strategies.
The back is the most difficult muscle to train. This is in part because you can’t really see the muscles that are working.
Unfortunately, many athletes think that they are doing everything right in back training, although in reality they go to poor, not high results.
Is this true for you? If you are pursuing one of the faulty strategies, the answer is yes – and you should chart a new course immediately!
1. Ignoring injury
The mistake is generally typical for strength training, but most often it happens in back training. Advanced athletes are so used to back pain – especially in the lower back – that training through pain has become commonplace because, you see, they work the upper back or know how to get around all the pitfalls. Newcomers to the iron world consider back pain an integral part of the process and continue to go ahead, because they have not the slightest desire to be branded as a weakling.
There is a difference between muscle pain and pain due to serious injury. The former may be commonplace, while the latter is a real threat and should not be taken lightly. Be vigilant and listen for alarm bells before grabbing heavy shells again. You may have to take a short break, but this is a paltry price to pay to avoid irreversible damage to the intervertebral disc or surgery.
2. Excessive complication of training
I really enjoy trying new things just to see how it works. There are many innovative techniques out there to shock the lats with training stimuli they have never seen before.
But it’s one thing to try something new, and quite another to waste precious time. People try all sorts of complicated movements to put stress on their backs, but their real problem is that they never learned how to establish the most important neuromuscular connections in basic exercises .
If you’re doing bent-over rows correctly , you should feel like your lats are working. If you pull up without jerking or swaying, your back will burn after training. If your back muscles do not hurt the day after training , this does not mean that it is time for you to switch to more difficult exercises. This is a signal that you need to learn how to recruit muscles more efficiently.
You should feel the result of training in your back muscles here and now. If you don’t feel, don’t waste time on advanced exercise options. Focus on the basics, learn to recruit the right muscles, and only then engage in more complex movements.
3. Neglecting a pullover
If you neglect this classic back muscle exercise, you are missing out on a lot. The pullover is not easy to learn. And even when you learn how to do it right, a humble exercise to get you to work with less weight than you would like, just to maintain the correct form. But one thing is certain: the pullover is the coolest tool for developing the lats.
This venerable back exercise is a favorite of many champions. One of them is the six-time Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates, the second is some guy named Arnold … If there is at least one cable simulator in the gym – Yeats’s favorite version – it’s time to get to know him better.
If you don’t have a simulator, try making a pullover the way Arnie did it – arm yourself with a dumbbell and lie down on the bench. Stop neglecting effective exercises just because you are already doing chin-ups and deadlifts. Spend a few weeks in the company of this movement and your back will start to grow like a weed.
4. Low-repetitive training
When training your back, you can feel incredibly strong – just what is the passage to the rack with dumbbells, on which there was no projectile worthy of you. To test the level of a superhero, it is tempting to try a one-arm deadlift with 2-4 reps – this is the only way you can use the heaviest dumbbell in the gym and feel like an unrealistically tough guy. And you can also hang six pancakes on each side of the handle, so that then only to tear the projectile off the floor a couple of times.
Unless you’re a weightlifter, you don’t need low rep training. Muscle hypertrophy occurs when combining heavyweights with a lot of repetitions, one is not enough. Yes, it’s curious to check your deadlift highs from time to time, but if you’re serious about building muscle, your reps should be at least six.
Don’t put spokes in the wheels of your height by cutting down on repetitions. At first, you will have to reduce the weight a little, but if you stick to the right strategy for developing your back muscles, you will eventually gain both strength and volume. Before you can blink an eye, you will again hang pancakes on the barbell and return to the elite edge of the dumbbell rack.