 So pull downs rows, there's different variations. Like I can row from down here, from here, from up here. And then as soon as I come up here, now it's more of a pull down and I've got different, you know, different. And the, and the point that are the, the part that makes it different for the back is not really the position of the wrist as much as it is the position of the elbow. Right. So it's like understanding that you can grab all these cool variation handles and that helps dictate where the elbow goes. That's right. And so what you're really paying attention to is where the elbow, like, so if I'm in supinated, look where my elbow drives versus where if I'm in a wide grip, look where the elbow drives. Today's episode, we're talking about developing the muscles of the back. Everything about the back. The best exercises, reps, sets, all the different muscles you can focus on. If you want to develop a better back, this is the episode for you. It's the back master class. It's your least favorite also. Yeah, it's my favorite, man. You know what's funny about this is that in body building they just give like general like back. Like, do you know how many muscles make up the back? Just this whole master here, we're going to call back. Yeah, it's like, there's so many muscles that make up the back, but we're going to focus on, I guess, some of the major ones, like the main ones that you would want to target with exercises, because by targeting these muscles, you'll pretty much hit all of the muscles of the back. But it is, it's a huge area of the body. There's lots of different muscles that make up the back and there's lots of different functions that the muscles of the back produce. Everything from stabilizing your spine, giving you better posture to controlling your shoulder blades, your shoulders, you know, bringing the arms back and together, even helping with respiration and breathing. Like the muscles of the back, there's quite a few functions when you look at all of them. Were you always a big deadlifting back fan guy or did that develop over time? I, when I got into working out, the Mr. Olympia at the time, because I would read the bodybuilding magazines, was Dorian Yates, and he was known for his like insane back development. And then before that, you know, watching Pumping Iron for Uncle Colombo, you know, just because he was Italian, I thought, oh, that's cool. He had a big back. And so I just was like infatuated with developing this like really strong back. And then the deadlift was the one, that's the one exercise of all exercises that I did, that I was, I felt like I had a natural affinity to. Every other exercise I had to work really hard at getting good at with the deadlift. I remember I could deadlift 300 pounds very, very shortly, very quickly after I started working out. So it just became, it's just, you know, you combine those two things. It was like, yeah, it's my favorite. I feel like you could like literally split somebody in half as to whether or not they're a pusher or a puller and what comes easier for them, just naturally. Kind of weird, right? Yes, it's strange. But every time I ask, it's you're either more inclined to do some kind of a pulling move or a pushing move. But yeah, I was definitely on the pushing side. If I had to really work through pulling moves to get better at them, especially the deadlift. Well, I mean, that wasn't even really a part of your team for a long time because in football, you guys don't do that. Right? Not very. I mean, yeah, cleans you do pull it off the ground, but it's not a big part of it. I mean, it's a wide speed, right? I mean, there's not really a lot. You're not heavy deadlifting. You're not heavy doing cleans. You know, aside from, I'd love your opinion on this too, Justin, especially you, because of your pedigree and sports, that there's besides the hips, I would say you could you could you can't always judge someone's athleticism by looking at them. Obviously, there's there's many times when you can't tell and then the person performs phenomenally. Yeah. But I would say besides the hips, the back, the back tells you a lot, right? Tells you a lot of somebody's going to be strong if they're going to have good performance. If there's somebody that you need to be careful, especially right up along the spine, you can tell if you see that rectus spina you see like visible like muscle definition there that's protective for their core. You know that they got a lot of power output. Most of the time, it's pretty accurate between that and like, obviously, the big glutes and, you know, hip power that is responsible for that. I think you should get some extra credit to for the value it brings to just overall posture for general population. I mean, you're talking about athletes right now, we talk about bodybuilders, how important it is when you talk about sculpting and building a physique. But I think just for the average client and I think I started to figure this out towards the back half of my training career, I started to really put a lot of emphasis on, you know, the back in in like my old lady who just wanted to be healthy and fit because everything we do in our daily life is is anteriorly driven, right? Is there we're in front of us. And so, you know, you're driving, you're eating your everything rounds the body and closes the body and movements for the back does the opposite. It opens you back up and it strengthens those opposing muscles. And so I find that if you have neglected strength training for, you know, a long period of your life or your entire life, the back muscles are so important for just overall health and good posture. The number one injured part of a person's body is has to do with the back low back. And then if you move up the spine, there's even upper back exercises, neck exercise and neck, excuse me, upper back injuries and neck injuries are quite common as well. You know, it's funny, modern life. I mean, I'm right on there with you, Adam. Modern life is terrible for the back. It's like modern life took. So what's that that one line when it comes to hard labor, back breaking labor? Yeah, hard labor involves a lot of the back lifting things, pulling things, you know, you know, hitting hammers or, you know, a hoe into the ground where you're you're farming. Like that's a lot of back work. We got rid of all that. We got rid of all of it. And it's one of the most atrophied, weakened parts of a modern man or modern woman's body is the back. So just like you, I figured that right away when I would get a new client, the back, whether it be posture, stabilization, strength, like it was a big focus of my workouts was getting this person's back stronger because I knew if I could strengthen it that they would get these huge, profound benefits. And again, it's also super neglected. Like think about modern life, like you almost use none of your back. We don't pull ourselves up. We don't carry anything heavy. We don't lift anything heavy. No row anything. Nothing, nothing. So it's like the super out. You even see this in kids now. You see terrible posture and back. And see this. Oh, yeah, the protracted shoulder kyphosis, they're just like slowly turning into a shrimp. And you just kind of see this and you've seen the exaggerated version of that with like an 80 year old person that's just sort of like can barely even lift their head up at that point. And you know, gravity really like affects at that point, like when you let all these patterns kind of persist. So to be able to combat that with back exercise is crucial to keep you going. That was a big part of my sales presentation. So I used to do when I did the squad, I would do a squad assessment on a client and then I'd kind of show them where their posture was and everybody is forward, right? Like you never you never meet anybody with the opposite issue, right? Everybody is rounded forward. And if I had somebody who would say 30, 40, 50 years old in their life and they're not in this like eight year old position, I'm like, we've all seen that that eight year old that's got the walker and they're all hunched over like a shrimp like you're talking about. Like, do you think that person woke up one day and they just were like that? I'm like, no, when they were 30 and I would show their posture, they look like this. And they're 40 and they like this. And then they're 50 and I would show them like where they're at right now. And then what happens in ten years, ten years, ten years, ten years if you don't start to address it. And that's part of like my job. I know you came to me to lose 30 pounds and that's your main goal. But I also want to address these things. By the way, we we organize your strength training exercises. And so I would put a lot of emphasis on the post year chain and the back, right? And we had a I remember not that long it was a while ago. Now we had a question where somebody was asking us to like kind of debate whether we thought squat or deadlift was king. Like what's the king of exercise? And squat has been known as the king of all exercises for a long time. But I would make the argument that the deadlift is for these reasons. We we get up and down from our car, from the toilet, from your dinner table. And so most of us have some sort of squatting patterns that we we incorporate. But to the point you just made is what do we do? What are we doing where we do a pullover, a pull up, a row, a henge with it? Like you just those those behaviors don't really happen in normal day life. And so I would make the case that because of how neglected it is, it is king for that reason because they both could be argued how much muscle gets built and how many calories are burned and how many muscles are incorporated. But then which one is more, more crucial to overall health and posture? Maybe we should make doors heavier. Yeah, row and door open. You've got to figure this out. It's heavy as you. It's also the back also contributes tremendously to aesthetics. And even for women, I know sometimes when we're like, I don't want a big back. No, no, no, a good, strong, healthy back gives you good posture, which good posture is one of those things. If you have healthy posture, it's one of those things that that subtly shows good health. What I mean by subtle is if you're standing with bad posture and you corrected just a little bit, your attractiveness improves in relation to that posture. And people might not even be able to pick it out. They just noticed that you look better. You seem more confident. You seem more able, right? More prepared. And it's not just posture. It's also it gives the illusion of a smaller waist. It gives that for men, it gives you that wider shoulder look. And it just overall very important aesthetics in bodybuilding. And bodybuilding is an aesthetic sport. I know it's extreme, but there's a lot of truths in bodybuilding. What they find with the extremes in bodybuilding actually come from truths and evolution, like why we find certain things attractive. And what are they saying? Bodybuilding shows that the contests are won or lost as soon as the contestants turn around. As soon as they show their backs, that's what will win or lose a competition. So it's when it comes to aesthetics, even if you don't think you want this huge back or whatever, strength in your back will contribute from the front, your aesthetics and how you look even from the front. So let's talk about some of the muscles of the back and we're going to cover just kind of the major ones because there's so many back muscles that if we went through all of them would take forever. Not just that. If you just focus on the ones we're talking about, you're going to pretty much hit all the small muscles along the way as well. Now we also have a sale going on right now. We created a bundle called the at home holiday bundle, which includes maps anywhere, maps suspension, maps prime and the No BS six pack formula. All of them together would normally retail for $338. But right now you can get all of them in this special bundle for only $99.99. If you're interested, all you got to do is click on the link at the top of the description below to get signed up. All right, here comes the show. So the first one, let's talk about the lats. These are the big wide muscles of the back. They're the biggest muscles of the back and some, I remember learning that they were the biggest muscles of the body. Then I've heard people say it's the glutes. Nonetheless, it's up there. It's one of the largest muscles of the body and it's the wings part. It's the wings part of the back. It's actually the widest muscles of the body. Now what they're largely responsible for, because the lats, if you look at the lats from the back, you'll see that they kind of attach along the spine. Then they kind of come up and they fan out and then they kind of pinch in and attach in the humerus, right? In this kind of upper arm area. And what they essentially do is adduct the humerus or bring the arms in towards your body or from up top down towards your body. So a pull up, a pull down, a row. Those exercises are gonna work. Those big, meaty parts of the back known as the lats. And then aesthetically speaking, developing your lats gives you this really nice posture look. By the way, the lats are also involved in posture. A lot of people don't realize this, but the lats are involved in some way to stabilize the spine. And believe it or not, the lats also help a little bit with respiration as do most of the muscles of the back. Favorite exercises, lat pull downs, pull ups. I would have to say for a pure lat exercise, it's gotta be pull ups. Yeah, weighted pull ups, if you can. It's gotta be pull ups. And people ask what's better, like wide grip, close grip. I would say for most people, a relatively moderate grip, so not too narrow, not too wide, is probably appropriate for most people. But then as you become more advanced, you can find that different grips tend to work the muscles a little bit different. Oh yeah, I would make the case that there's tremendous value in varying up the grips. For sure. I try, if pull ups, which they have been in my routine actually pretty consistently for a while now, if, and I think a lot of that has to do with having a home gym, right? I don't have all, I don't have a lat pull down machine. I don't have a lot of different exercises. I have just the basic stuff. And since pull up is one of the best things I can do for my lats, it's a staple right now. But I love that the PRX has all the different. All the different grips. Yeah, so I'll go through a kick where I'm like, all the pull ups are neutral. All of them are kind of a wide grip. Some are gonna be a supinated grip. And they all attack the back in a slightly different way. And just the slight novelty of positioning the wrist and elbows in a different position hits the back different. So if I catch myself pulling up the same way, and it's been a while, it's like, it's just naturally I'll change that. So nice, yeah, change up with stimulus. And one thing I've found too that not a lot of people probably do, I've seen it done a few times. I'm always a big proponent of rotation. And so trying to mimic that kind of spiraling line in a press, but now using that as a single arm pull, lap pull down too. I love doing those as well, just to sort of counter that same movement and bring kind of control and stability there to help the shoulder kind of really stay healthy and packed in place. Yeah, I like that. And you're gonna get some interesting bicep activation with that while you're turning the hand. And it hits kind of all those different motions. I just change the grips up a lot is what I like to do. I would say a wide grip requires definitely more strength and more shoulder stability. Cause so the risk of injury goes up a higher, whereas a more narrow grip tends to be a little bit safer. I think neutral will probably feel the most comfortable for the other. Your hands are facing each other. Yeah, I would totally agree. We're probably the most comfortable for someone. Totally. In rows, rows also hit the lats quite a bit. It's just not as direct of a lat exercise and rows hit more of the mid-back muscles. Yeah, I'd put wrong voids and traps in that. Right. And so let's get to that, right? So before you get to that, I want to say something that Justin just like lightly said. And I think this was a, I want to try why we go through this whole masterclass to share things that like we're like, I don't know, either, you know, you know, pivotal moments in our training, like in talking about the lats, he said weighted pull-ups. For the, for a long time, I understood the value of pull-ups and I just did body weight. And as I got stronger, I just did more reps, more reps, more reps. And it wasn't really until we started training together and I didn't start training the single, the double, the triple, even like anything under five, five by five, just never hit my routine. And so it never dawned on me why I would do three pull-ups. And so I just never did that. And that didn't happen until later. I saw huge benefits from loading pull-ups really heavy and just doing two or three. Treating like a true strength exercise. Yes. Yeah, muscle endurance. It was always muscle endurance. It was like, oh, I haven't done pull-ups in a while. Let's get back to pull-ups. And of course, if you haven't done them in a while, sometimes like five to 10 is hard. And then I'd work my way all the way up to where I'm repping out 20 plus. And then it was like, oh, then I let it fall into my routine and then I come back. It wasn't until way later in my lifting career that I actually, when I'd progress in pull-ups to think, oh, now I'm getting up to 12, 15 reps, instead of me just keep progressing on reps, how about I load this sucker and do, you know, five of these or three of these. And I saw huge development in my back by doing that. So I just want to pull that out. So I did weighted pull-ups pretty early because I read an article by Jack LeLane. And Jack LeLane, at one point, I think it was 50, he set the world record for push-ups and pull-ups. And they said, well, what are some of your secrets to being able to do? So I think he did 1,000, if I'm not mistaken. 1,000 push-ups. He did. He actually had the record before David Goggins and then Mike McCastle. Mike McCastle, yeah. And just had held forever. Again, he was 50 years old, pretty remarkable. And he said, oh, heavy bench presses and weighted pull-ups. And everybody was like, what? And so he actually did. He saw that heavy bench presses got him better at push-ups and weighted pull-ups got him better at doing lots of reps of pull-ups. And so I started doing this. I would put a dumbbell between my legs and do, you know, two or three reps. And it's one of the best exercises to do weighted. A lot of people don't know that. A lot of people don't know that. And some exercises lend themselves better to low reps. I didn't know that. I mean, I was as a trainer and knowing the value of pull-ups, I neglected that. And by the way, even if you were gonna train, I would use that tactic even when I was gonna do high rep for the post-activation potentiation value from it, right? So I go one or two reps real quick, heavy, weighted. And then I go high reps and you'll see how easy the reps are after you do one set of really heavy. It's mind-boggling. So such a hack, right? For getting good at pull-ups and building a strong back and good lat. Totally. All right, now let's talk about the traps, the trapezius muscles. Now, these muscles actually have quite a few different functions. A lot of people think of just doing shrugs. That's the upper traps. The mid-traps actually bring their shoulder blades back together. So doing like a row where you're pinching your shoulder blades back will hit that kind of mid-upper, mid-trap area where you kind of wear the, if you look at the neck, like below the neck, kind of give you that muscularity there. And then the upper traps shrug the shoulders up. But they shrug their shoulders up kind of in this up and back position, not this forward position. When you move them forward, you hit other kind of muscles a little bit more. Levitate or scapulae being one of them. Now, the traps are very important for shoulder stability. Having weak, tight traps is quite common, especially with people who work on computers all day long in this kind of forward position because the CNS tells the traps to stabilize their shoulders because we've got really poor mobility and strength. So people are always complaining about tight neck muscles. Working the traps out properly, along with other back muscles will help alleviate a lot of these issues. Which is counter-intuitive, right? Because a lot of times when you're tight and in pain in that position, you think you just need to stretch it out and relax. And to be able to strengthen a lot of these imbalances and added points of stress really helps to kind of alleviate pain in general. Totally. So a point that you made that, again, another one of these things that took me a while to piece this together, I remember getting on a kick and wanting to build my traps. And what I ended up doing was all these variations of shrugs. Neutral grip, behind the back shrugs, like forward, supa, I did all these shrug stuff to do it. I even did the reverse shrugs where you actually had the barbell above your shrug. I did all kinds of crazy stuff with that. Never really focused on my upper back where I targeted it with rows with my elbows elevated with that. And you can really develop the traps by actually hitting them like that. And my traps got so much bigger and better from doing that. And I think that a lot of that had to do with, I had already done all the shrugging stuff like crazy and I had put zero emphasis on the back of the upper back and actually doing like rows where you elevate your elbows. And I saw tremendous value in building the traps that way. Yeah. Do you have any favorite trap exercises for you guys? I, you know, have you ever done the one where it's behind your back or barbell? Yeah, that was a... Lee Haney. I love that one. That was his favorite. Lee Haney was a six or seven time Mr. Olympia. That was his favorite. I mean, you got to have good shoulder mobility. Yeah. That's a pull-in-off. You got to go light. Discretion, but yeah. The reason why it works so well behind the back is because you have to keep your shoulders back in order to clear your glutes right when you're doing it. So the untraditional stuff are the things that blew my mind. Like I had done all the shrugging things. Like I said, the high rows where I was, you know, rowing with my elbows up in the air and like elevated. So I was targeting really high and snatches. Oh, God. My traps blew up. Hand cleans though, right? Yes. They are the hand cleansed, excuse me. Oh, you're talking about snatch grip hand cleansed. Yeah. Oh, that one's nasty. Yeah. And that just, I did not, I did not see that coming at all. And in fact, I remember I pieced it together when I was doing the hand cleansed presses for my shoulders and my traps just like, my traps, shoulders, everything blew up from that exercise. And I loved it because in my space, when I was doing that with the bodybuilding community, nobody was doing that. It's such a power lifter, Olympic lifter type of move that none of the bodybuilders were training that way. And I saw a huge development from doing that exercise. That's gotta be my favorite is a snatch grip, high pulls or hand cleans or hand pulls. We got those in MAP Strong. That's the first time I ever did them was Robert Oberst told us about them. I followed the program and I couldn't believe how much my traps responded. And I did lots of shrugs and stuff like that, but it was that snatch grip, high pull, that really. There's a lot of gems in that program for your traps and for your posterior chain in general. Yeah. That's crazy. And then I like, you know, of course there's shrugs, but I also like doing shrugs on an incline on a really, really high, almost straight back incline. So the incline is just slight leaning forward on it. So my face is facing the actual, the seat and then shrugging and the reason why I like that is because I'm just forward enough to where I can target. I like that too because what you're doing is you're almost incorporating a little bit of a row and with the shrug. And that back to the point I was making about, you just don't, a lot of people don't tend to target the traps like that by trying to, and you get kind of both right there with the shrug and pulling back. And what I really like about it is I get a full range of motion. I'll let my shoulders really drop so I could feel that full range of motion. This is the biggest mistake people make with shrugs, by the way, he's using too much weight in a short range of motion because you can load the hell out of shrugs and look cool in the gym. Look, I'm grabbing the 150s or whatever and kind of do this like chicken head, you know, movement or whatever. Go lighter, focus on all the way up, squeeze real hard all the way down, let them stretch a little bit, all like do that with lighter weight, watch what happens, makes a huge difference. All right, next up are the rhomboids. These muscles actually are underneath the traps. It's a deep back muscle, but they're involved in stabilizing the shoulder blades and they bring the shoulder blades back. This, my favorite exercise for rhomboids or ropes, just good old barbell rows. That's it. And it gives me that upper mid-back thickness. I do the Dorian eight style one, I'm not flat to the ground, but I'm up at 45 degrees. And then I get kind of mid-trap, kind of, you know, mid-rhomboid activation. Get fun and functional with it and do some fast twitch stuff with like pendelae rows or then I'll go bent over, but with rotation added in there for me. So yeah, I like to change it up like that, but really, I mean, rows are staple. That is just something that's gonna help to counter a lot of this anterior forward movement and stress. I love pendelae rows. And so, you know, you said something about the way you were shrugging doing traps. So this is an example of like programming, how my brain works. If I'm gonna be, if I'm gonna do that exercise where you're leaning over the bench, facing forward and shrugging, I'm not gonna do standard barbell rows because I'm already hitting that area pretty well. You're gonna do pull-down pull-ups. Yeah, or I'm gonna do completely bent all the way over and do pendelae, where I hit more in that targeted area. So if I do an extra, now if I do something that's more traditional where I'm doing like a normal shrug, then like a bent over, a traditional bent over barbell row where I'm at like, I don't know what degrees that is, but not quite, pendelae bent over, but I like pendelae. What's the one where you're laying on the bench with a wide grip? Seal row. I like the wide grip. You only spine those at a few gyms. I've never done it. Oh yeah? No, I've never found a place. I thought the Cuddle one didn't have one of those? No. Where you're laying on the bench? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's got the bar that does this. I've never done it. Now to be honest with you, it looks uncomfortable, like you won't be able to breathe. There's some pressure in the stomach. But I've never done it before. You guys like it, huh? Oh yeah, I love that. And I'll do a variation of that with an inclined bench and do dumbbells that way. That's how I've always done it. So it's similar to a seal row that you just, you're not quite parallel to the floor. You have kind of, you're taking the inclined bench up at just a tiny bit and to where my hands are down. I won't hit the ground. And I roll that one. Well this is especially good after you've fried, like by doing like heavy deadlifts and you want to still hit your back, right? Yes. You get that chest support so that way it doesn't like add that extra stress on your back. That's a great, great point, Justin. Another example of like understanding programming. If I'm gonna do heavy deadlifting and my erector, Spinae is gonna be fried just my look like I'm fried already from doing something that heavy. I'm gonna support myself and things like that. Do more chest support. Yeah, I might not do a barbell row. I might do a T bar row or a seal row or do something seated because I already. Or even a one-arm dumbbell row, right? At least the hand in your knee. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, 100%. And you know, we're gonna get to this but the exercises for back can be broken down into kind of two categories. But that doesn't necessarily mean they're all the same. And we'll get to that in just a second. But first we need to talk about the erector Spinae muscles. These are the muscles that run along the sides of the spine and they help extend the spine, right? They keep it strong and straight. And when these are well developed, if you look at someone from the back, you'll see that channel. Yeah, it goes in, right? Canals. Where the spine is, it kind of goes in because there's these muscles along the side. This looks very, very attractive in both men and women. So you'll see women will wear like a backless dress. And when she has that nice developed kind of mid-back, they'll look really good. And then of course with the man, it exemplifies strength, posture, and stability, right? Erector Spinae muscles extend the spine. So you can do back extensions. You can do supermans on the ground. Or you can do deadlifts. And we'll get to the deadlift, but the deadlift isn't just an erector Spinae muscle exercise. The deadlift actually hits everything. It's not, but it's definitely the king of that. And if you, I can tell, when you talk about the canals on somebody's back, if you deadlift or not. That's where you can tell. It's a dead give away when you don't. And it's very obvious when you do it, especially when you're good at it and you can lift and you can deadlift heavy, that develops those canals like nothing else. It's okay. What are your guys' opinion then? If you're a deadlifter, do you spend very much time doing hyper extensions? No. I don't. That's a good point, no. No, not a ton at all. I do rotation. I do stuff for my QL. But not a ton of back kicks. I'll do some, but not a ton. Yeah. I mean, every now and then I'll throw in some, some cobras, like floor cobras or like weight with some dumbbells, but just, you know, in terms of like being intentionally doing hyper extensions, no. I just feel like you're getting, you're getting so much from the deadlift in that, in that department. And because that's such high stress already, it's like, what am I really doing with this simple exercise where I'm like body weight or holding a 45 pound plate and doing hyper extensions when I was just doing 400 pounds deadlifting two days before. I actually like back extensions better for the glutes. There's a way to do them. Yeah, you round, you round and you tuck in. And it's all on the hips. And it's actually a better glute exercise. Then it's like a, it's like a good morning on the, on the hyper extension. Exactly. What machine is that called a reverse hyper where your legs go up? Oh yeah. Love that machine. I prefer that actually. Yeah. All right. So exercises for the back can be broken down into some pretty basic categories. The first one, the most obvious one are pull downs and rows. So exercises where you're pulling from up here to down here and then rowing is anything from in front of you back. Now that doesn't mean that all rows and all pull downs are the same. With rows, you could change the grip and you can change the angle a little bit. And the same thing is true, did I say rows? The same thing is true for pull downs. So pull downs, rows, there's different variations. Like I can row from down here, from here, from up here. And then as soon as I come up here, now it's more of a pull down and I've got different, you know, different angles. And the point that, or the part that makes it different for the back is not really the position of the wrist as much as it is the position of the elbow, right? So it's like understanding that you can grab all these cool variation handles. And that helps dictate where the elbow goes. That's right. And so what you're really paying attention to is where the elbow, like so if I'm in supinated, look where my elbow drives versus where if I'm in a wide grip, look where the elbow drives. So when you're creating variety for the pull down and the row, think less about the handle, you know, different, you know, cool tools that you can get. Think more about where the elbows are driving down and back and how different and it is from the last exercise or whatever thing that you had been doing more recently. So that's how you vary those movements. Totally. Now let's get to the deadlift. There's some interesting controversy sometimes in our space about the deadlift. Is it a hip exercise? Is it a back exercise? Well, it's both, it's both. But the interesting thing about the deadlift is it's amazing for both. You almost never find an exercise that's incredible for two things. It's either like, well, it's really good for this but maybe not so much for this, but it works that as well. When it comes to deadlift, it's one of the best back exercises period end of story. It will develop all the muscles that we covered here in this episode. Part of the reason is the load. There's almost no exercise that I can think of, no traditional exercise that I can think of where you'll be able to use as much weight as you can with the deadlift. So the potential for tension with the deadlift is so high. If I do a 500 pound deadlift versus a row with 220 pounds, I mean, they're both heavy, but man, 500 pounds is 500 pounds. And the tension produced in my back is gonna activate so many different muscle fibers. And like Adam said, I can almost always tell when someone doesn't deadlift by how well or poorly their back is developed. Makes a huge difference. I mean, it's about the amount of force that you can generate. It has to meet or exceed the demand of the load. And so to be able to do that with a substantial amount more weight that you're gonna deadlift off of the ground, it just places more demand on the overall exercise which then affects your body to grow, to meet the environment that you're placing it in. What's the book that you always tout, Justin, that is the one that talks about- Super training? Is that the one with all the isometrics? Talks about all the science behind isometrics? So for the people that don't know where they stand on this deadlift argument that I cannot stand that we even have- I wish people would just go read all the studies. Yeah, but I also like do it for six months. Let's simplify this so people understand. Let's first back it all the way up to understanding. If you understand the science behind isometrics and the value on what it has for muscle building. If you've listened enough episodes of Mind Pump, you've heard us talk about that's the reason why we've incorporated some of our programs. We talk about it as one of the lost secrets of training that people do not put a lot of focus on. That talk about the king of isometric exercises. We just talked about all these different muscles that are in the back. It's this massive muscle and it is in a massive isometric exercise. You are having to keep the spine completely rigid and in order to keep that spine rigid like that, all these muscles that we're talking about have to activate in fire. Well, so along those lines, for the erector spinae, if your spine does zero flexing, which it's gonna do some flexing with a heavy deadlift, but even if it does zero, yes it's isometric for the erector spinae, but it is not isometric for the lats. Yeah, because you're moving. Your arms are in front of you at the bottom and as you stand up, your arms come to your side. So your lats actually go through contraction. Your trapezius, your rhomboids go through contraction. When your hands are down here and you pull way up, your scapula, your shoulder blades do come together at the top of the movement. So in some ways it's like a super high tension isometric exercise. The reason why people think, and the reason why I bring up the isometrics is because people look at the range of motion on all the muscles you just said and they go, it's this tiny, short and range of motion. Therefore it's inferior to these other exercises that take the muscle through full range of motion. My point of bringing up the isometrics is we understand how valuable it is just to create an isometric contraction or tension and how much muscle that can build. So this whole idea of just taking it through range of motion dictates whether it's a superior exercise or not is moot. It does matter that you are creating so much isometric tension in those muscles that you would never be able to load it like that in any other exercise. And that's what brings so much value to that. Not getting so detailed about, oh well this is technically contracting a little bit here and a little bit there. It's like, because that argument is where people try and argue against it. Oh well what you're saying right now, a lat pull down, that's weak. You only take it through a quarter of the range of motion compared to doing a pull over. A pull over does way more style than that. And so then they try and take that argument, that direction that it's a short and range of motion. Therefore it's inferior. But my point of bringing the isometrics up is that isometrics have so much value and show me an exercise that you can load like that and get that kind of isometric tension. You can't, you can't. It's the heaviest exercise that most people will ever be able to do. It's also got tremendous carryover. So like if you add 50 pounds to your deadlift, you're gonna be a lot stronger in pretty much every back exercise. So if it's not like this traditional back exercise then why does that always happen? In fact, I've had clients where we've gone through cycles where we're just trying to get better at deadlifts and I do minimal. I don't have any minimal any other back exercise, do a little bit, but pretty minimal. Then we go back to other traditional back exercises and they're the strongest they've ever been. This happened to me, if you listen to this show since day one, you heard me go through this. Like I shared this experience. This was after you were already a pro competitor. Yes, yes. I was not deadlifting consistently and I never really, and I decided for the first time in my life after already training 15 years in my life that okay, I'm gonna go on this kick where I just, I eliminate like 90% of all the back exercise I was doing and all I was gonna focus on was deadlifting and I got really strong with deadlift. I got my deadlift up to 550 pounds and then after I'd done that, I'd gone back to the traditional movements and I was across the board on these movements that I hadn't done in months, some of them over a year and all of them I was stronger in. That, and including hamstring curls, which also got hit. We like blew my mind. I'd been working on that hamstring curl machine my whole life and couldn't get past a certain way. I was double the weight when I got back. That just, and what's so crazy, because we know, we understand the sed principle, how important it is like for a very specific exercise and movement to think that I was able to not do all those exercises and see huge strength gains and that to me was enough for me to go, holy shit, that amazing of an exercise. Now let's talk about some back isolation exercises and really they're mainly, I would say, lat isolation exercises. That's where you kind of put most of the exercise in this particular category and these include things like a straight arm pull down or a dumbbell pullover. Now I love the dumbbell pullover because there's almost no exercise that trains that particular motion, right? We're going from back here. Like combos tricep and lats, which is an interesting blend. Yeah, I think it's just a healthy exercise to do. It works on thoracic mobility. It works the lats, the chest, to a small extent is involved there. So I think pullovers are straight arm pull downs. Straight arm pull downs more for lats, isolating pullovers more just for shoulder function and just more of that kind of classic bodybuilder pullover type value or whatever. I think that pullovers are a must exercise in clients routines regardless of your goal. Yeah, just very, very few times in your life as we age or will you be required to lift your arm completely above your head like that and using gravity to take you through that to help you connect to your lats, to your shoulders, to all the stabilizer muscles when you're all the way pulled back in that position has so much value for overall health. And so this would be an exercise that you would see me doing with my 70-year-old client because of how much value that it holds. And also too to a lot of athletes that I've trained and just the people in general that are in the gym that get really strong in one direction. This is a great counter to a lot of shoulder chest strength that will help to also be able to stretch and maintain mobility and have that ability to reach over your head without having to put so much emphasis on all of the mobility drills and things that we highlight. Yes, that's good, but there's also ways to incorporate this in your training so it's just a constant thing that you're checking and you don't have to go back and really address it through kind of mundane mobility exercises. Yeah, if you have tight lats, do pullovers with a lightweight and focus on the stretch. Cross bench, meaning the bench is like this and you're laying across it, not down it like you normally would so that you can sink your hips as your arms go back and really get a lat stretch on the way down. All right, let's talk about rep ranges. You know, back exercises, the back muscles do really well in all the rep ranges. I mean, low reps do really, really well for the back and so do higher reps. It's one of those areas where I encourage clients to do all of them. I do this for most muscles, but I like the low reps for back especially because like deadlifts, they lend themselves really well to low reps, but what's the key with this? The key is to train in all the different rep ranges and I almost always advise people to stay within a particular rep range for a few weeks before moving to another one just so you can get into that zone of what it means and feels like to train for 15 reps or 10 reps or five reps, right? Low reps, moderate reps, high reps, they all work really, really well and all the exercises that we talked about work well in all these rep ranges. Deadlifts though, however, I will say special, just special focus here. If you go high reps with deadlifts, be very careful. Form starts to break down when you fatigue and then that can become, you know, a high risk exercise. Yeah, just go light. I mean, I do still think- You have to go real light. I still think there's lots of value though in high rep deadlifts. So just you have to reduce the load. You have to judge the weight properly. Yeah, you can't go, oh, I'm a five. I mean, I did high reps deadlifts just to get literally just yesterday. But I just got done saying I can't deadlift 500 right now but let's say I can deadlift 400 right now, I'm sure I could. I was deadlifting 135. Right, right. And you're just focusing on- And slowly controlled, yeah, setting it down and like it was just, I mean, I got a crazy pump from it because I hadn't done that in a long time. So, you know, you had to reduce the load. Now, and I know I could have put 225 and muscle those out, but it's like, why? You know, I mean, the goal is to, you know, train in a novel way because I hadn't trained in that way. I don't want to risk that with a high risk type of movement like that. So lighten the load and still do that. Yeah, tempo, technique. You know, when we're looking at the back, really slow down, focus on the squeeze. That'll help you connect to the back muscle. So when you row, pause here at the top of the movement and squeeze the shoulder blades back and squeeze and see if you can feel the different parts of your back contracting. I think tempo and technique are important for the entire body, but especially important for the back because you can't see it. You can't see the muscles squeezing. It's really a feel thing. It's a feel thing. And for beginners, the back has got to be, the muscle, the back got to be the hardest to feel for people when they're training. It's so hard for them. But then once you start to feel it, it gets easier because then you can start to concentrate more. So you just reminded me another pivotal moment in my training career with back. And that was when I learned to control the weight back on the negative, and then I could take advantage of like the eccentric portion, right? So you remember when we used to teach like a seated row, for example, to a beginner client, sit up tall and straight upright row, you'd stick your fingers in their back and show them how to squeeze and come back. And then as you became more advanced and you really understood how to control with the lats and to resist the weight on the way back, you'd actually encourage them to roll the scapula all the way forward. As they come forward. As they come forward, they get more range of motion. Yes, you get a greater range of motion in the lats. Yeah, you get those rhomboids, mid-traps there. So, and traditionally what you see a beginner lifter doing is they do a seated row and even if they get good form, right? They understand how to squeeze their lats and then they let the weight just pull it back versus learning to activate the back and control the weight. And the same thing goes for like a row. Real common, you see people row, they throw the weight up there and then they let gravity just pull it down when you get really good at controlling the negative with your back, you'll see a huge, I think, change in the way your back gets developed by learning to do that. Yeah, you probably should work out your back two to three days a week and you do want a deadlift at least once a week and your routine should have some pull downs and some rows. You want to kind of have both in your workouts because they're both really important. And that's pretty much it. It's nothing super complicated. Just make sure you have some kind of a deadlift, some rows, some pull downs and then focus on all the stuff that we talked about and you should be able to develop yourself a really nice back. Look, if you like this podcast, head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out all of our free guides. We have guides that can help you with almost any health or fitness goal. You can also find all of us on social media. So Justin is on Instagram, Mind Pump Justin. You can find Adam on Instagram, Mind Pump Adam and you can find me on Twitter at Mind Pump Sal. Today we're going to teach you everything you need to know to build a strong, well-developed chest. When I think of weak points and areas that I struggled with developing for a really long time, chest was up there with the work. Yeah, it was for me, it was for me for sure. I got more caught up in the weight I could lift versus how I was developing my body. I think it's one of the most challenging muscles to develop for most people because the form and technique.