Backtivation

Resident MAXIM fitness guru Alexa shares her tips, tricks and training to beefing up your back...

- By Alexa Towersey

If there’s one set of muscles that truly separates the wheat from the chaff when it comes to strength, physique and athletic performance, it’s undoubtedly a big, strong back. This is the foundation – not just for the people pleasing V Taper that we can gaze on from behind, but from which bone crushing strength and power can be built. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to choose the “best” back exercise because the back isn’t just one muscle. And simply hammering rows, pulldowns and pullups with the same angles and grip in every workout isn’t going to cut it either, because even though your lats, traps and spinal erectors are the super visible muscles, they aren’t the whole picture.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

When building a bragworthy back, you’re looking for both thickness and width, so you’ve got to know what muscles you need to hit, the right angles to hit those muscles, the best exercises to hit those angles, and then how to best program the exercises.

TOP TIP

Different back muscles respond better to different loading schemes. For instance, the lats respond well to heavier loading, but the posterior delts respond best to higher reps and metabolic stress.

BACK WIDTH

The muscle primarily responsible for creating width is the latissimus dorsi AKA the lats or wings. These drive shoulder extension and adduction (think arms moving behind and towards the body), and contribute to scapular retraction, depression, and downward rotation (think shoulder blades moving down and together) – all pivotal movements in vertical and horizontal pulls.

BACK THICKNESS