Best Back Workout Video Ever (HIT EVERY MUSCLE!!)

What’s up guys? Jeff Cavalier from athleanx.com today we’re going to do the definitive back training workout video for you and this is why, cause I’m breaking out four damn markers for you guys. Matter of fact, it’s a whole new package of markers to make sure that 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 him 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 is done, there’s a lot more going on in the back than just the last. As a matter of fact, you can see I got a whole damn 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 are the best exercises to target those areas so you have a better understanding that this time you attack your back workout. Okay, let’s start with the labs. That’s probably the one that you’re at least training, right? So what we want to do is look at the anatomy of the last more 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. And with that is the law. As it feeds down in, in, you’ll have the ex that kind of goes like this in your back. It’s the Thoracolumbar 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. So how would you train these while 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 less. I’m showing you here a lap pull down, but why is it that you might feel it more or at least more of a stretch when you’re doing an underhand lap pull down. As I’m showing you here, we’ll 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 of a lengthening here of the law 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 going to ultimately end down at your side peak contraction of the last, but you’re going to at least maybe have an understanding now why one might 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 your back or your traps, and we look at them, they’re big ass muscles. They’re the ones over here taken up all this space. They literally start at the base of your head on the bump here at 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 upon the area of that muscle we’re talking about. 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 last the way that they actually have to be trained. If you’re taking respect, the orientation, the fibers going down this way, then you want to actually be pulling up 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. And 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 in to 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 in back and hold your shale shoulderblades 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, and again, if you’re not used to train 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 them packed down and back.

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 better start. It’s the terrorists major. And look, it’s really close in proximity here to the lats. And guess why? Because it has a lot of the same function as the last. But there’s one key differentiator that you can do to target this a little bit more effectively. It’s gonna 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 in the width of it is sort of neutral about shoulder width apart. If you want to start targeting in favoring a little bit more of the terrorist major that 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 had, obviously it moves underneath the pen, but the idea is 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 in filling in maybe 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 and people don’t even know that they’re actually separate muscles. A lot of times it’s the rotator cuff and we’re talking specifically about the superspinatus, the infraspinatus and the terrorists minor. Again muscles that you never even think about training when it comes to back when you’re all focused on lats, lads, lads, but again, they’re really important because they actually fill in, again, this space up here on your upper back, above and below the spine of your scapula.

That’s where we get these superspinatus and the infraspinatus above and below. Now obviously the rotator cuff is a very vulnerable group of muscles that become injured often and people that don’t train, right? It’s a lot of us, but we can tell that we, if we give it some attention, it actually can respond really well and also complete that upper back development. Here’s how to do it. You got to externally rotate your arm. If you are 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 outwards in the socket. So what we can do is we can take an exercise like a w res and all these exercises are ones that we actually program in athlete and x because I know how important they are and how you need to make sure that you’re focusing on these.

The W res is one of them. You bend over like you’re going to do a root, a rear delt raised. But from here we’re actually going to rotate the arms backwards. 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 Ron Boyd Activation, which we’re gonna talk about next. And also the external rotation. So I’m hitting all three of those muscles at once. So I mentioned the Ron Boys. Let’s talk about the Ron boys again. If I look at it this side of my body here, you’re not going to really see them because they’re buried deeper than the traps. So the tracks are going to cover it all. But if you look at this side of my body over here, you can see that the Ron voids are right up in here.

Now the idea is they run up at a little bit of an angle, so when you’re doing your rumble and exercises like a t, right? All we’re trying to do is pull our shoulder blades closer together. They attach on the shoulder blade to the spine, so when they shorten, all they’re going to do is bring the shoulder blade from around the body back closer to the spine. But because of the angle that they run, when we do our tees, if you come up at a little bit of an angle, you’re actually going to get hit them even better. Again, these are exercises that you have to do. Rowing will actually work these muscles too, but the idea is you have to at least attack them a little bit more directly, sometimes with lighter waves to get more activation and better overall development. And finally, we’ll end to the low back.

And again, we’re going to talk about some of the top muscles and some of the ones that are underneath. But the ones we all talk about is the Christmas tree action, right? We’re looking at all of the fibers that run this direction here and we want to know how we do that. Well, really the most important thing, especially for the safety of your low back or the muscles that run up and down, they’re basically acting like guidewires that are actually strengthening and stabilizing your spine. Well, we can do that with something as simple as a hyperextension, right? If the, uh, if the fibers are going straight up and down, you can do what I’m showing you here. You’re just going to go from a flex position to an extended position or to a neutral position and strengthen the muscles that way. But there’s something I think you could do even a little bit better.

I talk about before how the Durango Lumbar Fascia has the lats that feed into it. So if they’re touching and feeding right into it, as you can see down at the bottom there that obviously they’re going to have some effect if you can get the last to be activated as well. So we can do that. We can combine the two. If you get into this band as I show you now, you’re going to flex force to the band wants to pull me in this direction. Now if I have to resist backwards and pull against the band, I’m working those spinal erectors, great. But at the same time I can pull my hands out inside the band and also now engage the lats and it’s going to give you the opportunity to start getting that low back, not just stronger, but to stand out and look a lot better.

All right. Now you might be asking Jeff, is there one exercise you’re usually good at coming up with exercises? One that I can do this going to hit every, every muscle in my back. Well unfortunately not every single one cause there’s a lot of muscles going on back there as you see. But there is one move here that will combine a lot of these things together and that is you get yourself on a hyperextension again and you allow your body to fold over in the starting position. So you’re pretty much perpendicular to the ground. If I’m holding a pair of heavy dumbbells down here at the ground and I lift them straight up. I’m actually doing, I’m in the frontal plane as I would be with a lat pulldown, but I’m basically doing an inverted lat pull down. I’m working the lats, I’m working the terrorists major.

I’m getting those muscles to fire up, but I’m not even done yet because what I do is I then return the weights back down. I come up into a normal hyper extension. I’m working now all those muscles that are low back that we talked about, all those deeper muscles. I now at this point hold at the top and then I do a row and I pull the dumbbells up, you know, close to my size and I try to retract those shoulder blades together. So now we’re working on some of those mid scapular muscles and not really necessarily doing all that great a job. It came to the lower traps and not necessarily doing all that greater job of getting the upper traps. We are trying to retract and hold, but we can do things maybe a little bit better for that. But you get the idea.

A lot of things are working at once here, so if you only have a very short amount of time, this might be the one quick option that you want to try to do. So there you have it guys, break out the muscle markers to help you to understand not just how important it is to train your back, but really how many ways you have to train your back if you want to get the most out of it. If you guys are looking to put the science back in strength, I hope these things make it a lot easier for you to visualize, but I do this every single time we do a workout in our athletics training system. I try to break down the science and put it back in strength so that you understand not just what to do but why you’re doing it. Because once you do, I guarantee the results come a lot faster. You can find our athletics program over@athletics.com in the meantime, if you found this video helpful, you want more muscle markers. Of course, I might even break out six or two packs next time, depending upon what we cover makes you leave your comments below and I’ll do my best. In the meantime, I will see you back here in just a couple of days to cover more of what you want to see. See Ya.

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