How to grow your back
Nikola Man
Today is the day we move on from talking about training concepts to discussing each muscle group individually. You can think of this as a continuation of the story on training program design, a second chapter if you will. Since it is directly connected to all the previous posts in the series, I strongly recommend that you go back and read all of the posts up until now. The series began with a post on the holy trinity of program design and we concluded the first chapter last week when we talked about the intensity continuum. Even though I will do my best to leave some explanations along the way, you should be familiar with pretty much all of the terminology. I say this upfront because it will get confusing if you haven’t read the previous articles.
Before we dive into the topic, let’s look at some back anatomy:
Latissimus dorsi (commonly referred to as lats)
These muscles contribute to back width with two main functions both of which revolve around pulling your arm to closer to your body, one when the arm is out to the side and the other when the arm is in front.
Trapezius, rhomboid major and rhomboid minor
These muscles contribute to back thickness and mostly through scapular retraction (imagine any rowing movement). One minor comment is that the upper portion of traps (trapezius) has the function of scapular elevation like in a shrug.
With that in mind, it is rather obvious that developing your back requires two types of movement: vertical pulling and horizontal pulling. Both really should be utilized (I recommend something close to a 50/50 split).
Okay, time to talk some volume.
Minimum volume (MV)
As you can probably recall (or you went back to read the article on volume) this value represents the number of hard sets necessary for you to maintain your size. For the average person this is around 8 sets per week, please note that for you this might be lower or higher depending on a million factors. What does it mean in practice? If you want to focus on a different muscle group or you want to let your body re-sensitize to growth you would do 8 sets of back work in a week. This can look something like this:
As a part of an upper body day on Monday you do 4 sets of lat pull-downs
As a part of your second upper body day on Thursday you do 4 sets of T-bar rows
Minimum-effective volume (MEV)
This is the minimum amount of work necessary to make some (minimal) progress. For most people this amounts to 10 sets a week. In essence, if you’re doing less than 10 sets you are probably not growing too much and if you’re doing 10 sets or more you are most likely achieving some growth.
Again this is easy to set up
5 sets of lat pull-downs on Monday and 5 sets of T-bar rows on Thursday
Maximum recoverable volume (MRV)
MRV is basically the most you can do and still recover. If you are doing more than this you will likely run into recovery issues. Back is pretty tolerant towards volume for most people and you can probably get away with 22-25 sets per week.
Intensity and frequency
Since back is made up of many different muscles you will benefit from variety in terms of exercise selection which I will talk about next but also in terms of repetition ranges. Namely, you could be doing heavy work with around 6 repetitions as well as light work with something like 15 or even 20 reps and obviously everything in between. When I say 6, 8 or 20 reps I mean that a set of that many reps is taken relatively close to failure per RIR (reps in reserve) scale.
In terms of frequency, doing your back only once a week is not particularly wise unless you have a back the size of Ronnie Coleman’s (you do not see the picture below). I recommend hitting the back twice a week, you can go as high as 3 or 4 but then you run into recovery issues and the intensity has to be manipulated a lot more strictly.
You are not this muscular
Exercise selection
I do not have much to say here except that you should be doing both vertical and horizontal pulls, so here are some exercises for both.
Vertical pulling
Horizontal Pulling
Tips for making a program
I like to structure my workout week in such a way that I have one day where I focus mostly on horizontal pulling movements with maybe one lighter vertical pulling exercise and another day where I focus mostly on vertical pulling movements with maybe one lighter horizontal pulling exercise.
If you want to prioritize one goal, for instance back width, you might want to do the vertical pulling workout earlier in the week when you are fresher and you might also want to do 60% of your back work vertically and 40% horizontally. Do the opposite for thickness.
Lastly, I suggest you start your mesocycle somewhere around your MEV and add sets each week before until you reach MRV then do a proper deload maybe switch one or two exercises and then repeat. So that would look something like this:
You do 12 sets of back work in week one to get a lot of easy gains. Then in week two you might increase the weight as well as add 4 sets of work. Week three you might not have progressed in terms of strength but you can add 2 sets of work to have a total of 18 sets. Week four you only increase weight if you’ve gotten stronger, if not maybe add a repetition or two where possible. Week five you add two more sets. Week six you add two more sets and then you do a deload.
Then you begin the next mesocycle with maybe 14 sets and go on from there.
Obviously this is just one example, there are quite literally thousands upon thousands of effective variations.
Other important comments
While I would argue proper exercise form is important for all muscle groups, it is even more important for your back. You will always see people swinging weights and doing all kinds of crazy thing in order to move more weight but this is simply pointless. Your muscles don’t know that you are lifting the whole stack on a pull-down, they do feel resistance (load) and if you are using your biceps, your lower back, your legs and momentum to move the weight you are probably not overloading the targeted muscle as much. Therefore, it is much better to use proper form and lower weight which you can control in order to achieve maximum motor unit recruitment as well as maximize the impact of that load on the targeted muscle.
DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT do pull-downs behind your neck. You can lift a heavier weight if you do it in front and your shoulder is in a safer position. On top of that, the literature suggests that you get BETTER activation of the lats if you do the exercise in the frontal plane. There is literally no advantage to doing this exercise behind the neck. Please stop. Seriously stop.
One more note on lat pull-downs, do them with your hands over the bar attachment (overhand grip) and with a width of approximately 1.5 of your shoulder width. I want to expand on that second point. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT think that if you’re doing the exercise with the widest grip possible that you are getting the best effect on your back width. You simply are not. You can lift heavier and the lat activation is much better if you do it with a moderately wide grip.
The final note is on deadlifts. I am not a big fan of deadlifts for back hypertrophy. Yes, they are a fantastic exercise for building overall strength, stability, some coordination but by no means are they necessary to develop a nice wide, thick back. They especially become a problem when you get stronger because this exercise is incredibly taxing and builds a ton of fatigue which makes the other work (work more important for hypertrophy) less effective. If you’re a beginner though, I recommend doing deadlifts, but I’d put them on a day where you focus the lower portion of your body more.