Q: No matter what exercise I use, I can’t feel my lats working. I’ve tried drop sets, but I get nothing from those. Any suggestions on how to get new growth for slacker muscles? I feel lat-less.
A: You’re not alone. Most trainees have difficulty feeling the back working. The arms tend to take over because the nerve-to-muscle connections to the lats are underdeveloped. But there is a great way to get in touch and grow the slacker muscles in your back…
If you’ve been following our e-zines for a while, you’ve no doubt read us talking about negative-accentuated (NA) training and how it can produce extra trauma in the muscle to trigger a bigger growth response. Well, another key benefit is that it enhances neuro-muscular efficiency—the nerve-to-muscle connections that help more fibers to fire.
An NA set is simply doing the positive stroke in one second and the negative in six. So on pulldowns, you would drive the weight down to your upper chest in one second, hold to lock in, and then release back to arm’s length in six seconds—really feeling your lats lengthen over the entire six-second negative…
When your elbows are almost at lockout, drive the bar back down in one second, hold to lock in, then repeat the slow-to-grow negative. You should pick a weight that allows around 7 of those NA reps per set…
NA sets have so many bodybuilding benefits, from enhanced neuro-muscular efficiency for slacker muscles to new stress for muscle-building success to extra fat burning via metabolic momentum. That’s right, the extra micro-trauma you create with NA training revs up calorie burning 24/7 as your body mobilizes for micro-tear repair. In other words, as your body fixes the muscular trauma from NA training, your metabolism moves higher and you burn more fat—even sitting still. That’s a key premise behind our Fat-to-Muscle Workout plan.
There are a number of ways to use NA sets…
1) As your second warmup set. Do your first light warmup set with a standard 2/2 cadence. Add weight and do an NA set—one second positive, six-second negative—so you reach failure at around rep 7. Add weight and do one or two standard heavy sets.
2) As a density finisher. Do your light warmup sets and your heavy work sets with a standard cadence, then reduce the weight for a final NA set—once again, use a weight that will allow you around 7 negative-accentuated reps. That final NA set will push more blood into the muscle due to the longer tension time—almost 50 seconds!
3) As a Shock-centric sequence. Here you pick a weight with which you can get 15 standard reps, but you do 7 NA reps instead. That set will be fairly easy. Rest for 45 seconds, then do another NA set of 7 reps. That will be close to exhaustion. Rest for 45 seconds and do a final NA set to failure. You may be able to get 7—just do as many a possible. This is basically 3X morphed with NA. You can even go to 4X or 5X, but keep in mind that more and more will get you painfully sore.
Note that NA training can be very traumatic to muscle tissue so be careful. But if you need to develop muscle feel, NA is the real deal. Try it on for size! (For more on NA training, how it works, and other ways to use it, see The X-centric Mass Workout e-book.)
Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.
—Steve Holman and Jonathan Lawson
www.X-Rep.com
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