Mr. America Doug Brignole opened my eyes to a number of bodybuilding missteps that I and lots of others have been making in the gym…
If you missed it, Doug recently won the 2019 AAU Drug-Free Mr. Universe at age 59, and he did it using only a handful of “ideal” exercises. Rows for back are not on his list…
That’s because the direction of resistance is incorrect for both lats and mid-back activation. How so?
Muscles pull most effectively toward their origin. So for the mid-back trapezius muscles, you want your arms angled out wide and perpendicular to the torso. Now retract the shoulder blades, almost like a horizontal shrug with an extremely wide grip. It takes very little arm movement for max activation…
For the lats, the direction of pull should be higher, your arm up at about 45 degrees to your torso. You pull slightly down and in, as these shots of Doug illustrate (page 24, Old Man Young Muscle)…
That’s the ideal line of force for your lats, pulling down and in toward your spine, the origin of that big back muscle…
But what about cable rows, T-bar rows or one-arm dumbbell rows? All of those have you pulling your arm or arms straight back. That’s a function of the rear-deltoid head.
So the rear head of the shoulder-muscle complex is getting the most emphasis from rowing.
Now the traps and lats do participate—just not very efficiently and certainly not ideally. It’s a biomechanically incorrect move for those back muscles, according to Brignole.
So how did Arnold and countless others develop great backs with inefficient moves like rows, an exercise that gets maybe a 6 out of 10 on the ideal-exercise scale?
One is volume. Lots of sets eventually stresses the back muscles enough for growth, despite focusing on the rear heads of the deltoids.
Inefficient-exercise choice is why so many bodybuilders have to do so much work in the gym for small blips in muscle growth.
Also, and I differ somewhat with Doug on this, rows do produce good stretch overload, particularly in the mid-back muscles…
Stretch overload has been shown in both animal studies and more recently human research to elicit unique hypertrophic effects. Getting some of that can help you build another “layer” of muscle mass. Exciting stuff…
So you can get a muscle to grow bigger with the stretch-overload trigger.
Even so, you should emphasize the most efficient “ideal” exercises; however, after that, loading each target muscle at elongation can provide extra mass creation.
There’s more on that, how to do it, as well as what exercises are best in the new ebook (see info below).
Till next time, train hard—and smart—for BIG results.
—Steve Holman and Jonathan Lawson
www.X-Rep.com
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