The back muscles are so often forgotten that it makes me sick. Sure, your back muscles are at the back, meaning you can't really see them well, but your back muscles are huge! There is plenty of room for some serious muscle to be built on your back. So the purpose of this article is to show you the basics behind building wide and thick back muscles.
When grouping muscles, it's often easiest to just talk about lower and upper. There are a heck of a lot of muscles in your back, but you don't care about their names, you just want to know how to train them, right?
Let's look at your lower back first. For the anatomically challenged, these are the muscles just above your bum. The best exercise to strenghten and build these back muscles is the deadlift. There are a couple of different variations of this. The two that I most frequently perform are the normal deadlift (Hey, theres no other name for it) and the Romanian, or stiff-legged deadlift. These are great because they work huge areas of muscle. They might not be as glamorous looking as the bench press or bicep curl, but they will still build you tons of muscle.
Now, lets look at your upper back. These are the muscles that people are going to spend more time on. They are the muscles that are going to make you look like you have wings. In order to build back muscles that are thick and wide, you're gonna need to focus on a couple of main exercises.
While most people waste their time on the good old lat pull down, you're going to be slogging away on the pullup apparatus. Pull ups are quite simply the best exercise to build your upper back exercises. If you aren't including this one into your workout routine, then you need to, now.
Another fantastic exercise for building back muscles is the bent over row. I'm not sure if you would've seen these being performed, because they usually aren't too popular by gym goers. Why? I have no idea really.
You might have done the sitting cable row before, which does the same sort of thing, but just not quite as good as the bent over row. If you don't believe me, try it for a few weeks and see if it changes your back at all.
The final exercise I want to mention is one that I rarely see performed. It works your trapezius muscle. If you don't know which one this is, it's the one that is just behind your neck and stretches down your back a little bit.
A well defined trap muscle can really improve your overall physique and it's a must have if your looking to build back muscles. The exercise I recommend you doing is the shrug. You can use a dumbbell or a barbell, doesn't matter. A great thing about this exercise is that you can use really heavy weights, so it will also build your grip strength at the same time.
So there you have it, a no nonsense guide to building the best back muscles of your life. So next time you go to the gym and you want to build your back muscles, think about what you read here and put it into action.
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