15 BEST Back Exercises For Growth (And How To Use Them)

If you want a wider, thicker, more balanced back, then there's four main reasons your back exercises need to target. I'll show you the best exercises for each of these regions. By the end of the video, you'll have a personalized back routine that you can start right away. Alright, so before we dive into the exercises, let's first talk about the most common mistakes that people make when choosing their back exercises. First mistake Most people think of the back as one muscle and will aimlessly put together a back workout without giving much thought as to what each exercise targets. For example, as you'll see in our exercises, simply changing your elbow position as you row will completely shift the muscles that are being targeted. Being unaware of these differences can lead to a back that may have a lot of width, for example, but lacks thickness and definition, or vice versa. Speaking of muscle imbalances, the second mistake people make has to do with neglecting the smaller back muscles that play an important role in keeping your shoulders healthy and posture upright. The last mistake has to do with your workout program. Even if people are aware of the best exercises for the different back muscles, they often end up doing too much volume for some and not enough for others, which fails to develop the back in a well rounded manner. We're going to solve each of these problems by equipping you with the best exercises and then showing you how to properly use them. Let's start with the upper back. So of the four main regions of our back, this region is where most of your back thickness and definition is going to come from. It consists of the upper traps, the mid traps and the teres muscles are which now given the unique anatomy and function of these muscles, they are best worked during exercises where the elbows pull at roughly a 45 to 60 degree angle away from the torso. We'll apply this along with a few other tips to six exercises to make them the best options to build a thicker, more defined back. First, up the barbell row, but performed in a way that focuses on the upper back muscles. The keys to do this are with your elbow angle and how high you pull the bar. Rather than keeping your elbows too close or too far out from the body, tuck them to about 45 to 60 degrees as you pull. Then, using an overhand grip, play around with the grip width until you find a placement that allows you to pull the bar to the level of your chest. Focus on driving your elbows back and squeezing the shoulder blades together at the top. Next, seated rows. But similar to barbell rows, the key here is with elbow angle as you pull. Rather than keeping your elbows too close to the sides, you keep them at about a 45 to 60 degree angle out from your torso. Keep your shoulder blades down as you pull, and squeeze your shoulder blades together at the end position. Using a wider handle here can make it even more effective. This next exercise, the meadows row, is a great way to help prevent imbalances by working one side of the back at a time. Use a landmine attachment and load it with smaller weight plates to increase the range of motion our back muscles will go through. Get into an athletic stance as if you were doing a barbell row, and then, while keeping your elbow angled at about 660 degrees, pull the bar up. Grip can get challenging here, so use a lifting strap if needed to prevent your grip strength from limiting your back gains. This next exercise is one of my personal favorites because it takes a need for stability out of the equation. First, set up your incline bench. Too high of a bench angle is going to shift too much the emphasis to the upper traps. So set it at a lower angle to about 30 degrees, which is often the second notch up on the bench. Then grab a pair of dumbbells, lay with your stomach on the bench, and then pull up to the level of your chest again with your elbows angled at about 45 to 60 degrees. Squeeze your shoulder blades together at the top and let them open up at the bottom of each rep for full range of motion. Now we're going to get into our vertical pulling movements, like the pull up to emphasize the upper back muscles more than the lats. You want to keep your elbows angled out to the sides by using an overhand grip. Slide slightly wider than shoulder width. All right, so this last exercise may come as a surprise, given the name, but based on the wide elbow angle used during lat pulldowns. As we learned earlier, this will biomechanically favor the upper back muscles more than it will the lats, which is why it's in this category. Speaking of the lats, though, let's now dive into how we can best target this next area of our back. So the lats are a broad muscle that's responsible for adding more width to the back based on the way the muscle fibers run. Unlike the upper back muscles, the lats are actually best targeted during exercises where the elbows can pull as close to the torso as possible. We're going to apply this along with a few other tips to make the next five exercises your best bet for growing a wider back. All right, so you remember how you performed the barbell row to Target the mid traps. We're now going to tweak that to emphasize the lats more. First, use a narrower grip that's about shoulder width. Then, when you pull this time, keep your elbows as close to your sides as possible. And then finally, to maximize the range of motion your lats go through, instead of pulling up to the chest, pull lower down towards your belly button. Next, we're going to apply similar tweaks to the seated rows I showed you earlier. To now make them more lat focused. First, tuck your elbows close to your sides and keep them there as you row. Second, avoid arching your back as you pull, as that's going to shift more of the load to your upper back. Instead, keep your torso straight or if you can, maintain just a slight lean forward to favor the lats even more. And finally, rather than thinking about squeezing your shoulder blades together, think about driving your elbow down and back as you pull. Okay, back to one of my personal favorites, the chest supported row. But now with the elbows angled close to the sides and pulling lower down the body as if you're trying to tuck your elbows into your back pockets. Next, similar to the meadows row for the upper back, to prevent imbalances from developing, we can do single dumbbell lat rows. Here we'll want to again, keep the elbows tucked and think about pulling your elbows down towards your back pockets. Our last exercise will be a pull down, but one that actually targets the lats. To perform it, get into a kneeling stance in front of a cable machine. Grab the handle with a neutral grip, lean your torso forward slightly and then pull your elbow down while keeping your elbow as close as possible to your sides. By the way, guys, if you're enjoying this video and you think that I should do another one just like this as part of a series, then comment below what muscle group you'd like to see and I'll cover that next. But for now, let's get back to training the third region of our back. Alright, so we've covered the big muscles that'll add thickness and width to our back. Now we need to balance this out by working the lower traps, a small yet important muscle that tends to get neglected. Research such as this 2008 paper has shown that this muscle is best worked by matching our arm angle to the direction the lower trap muscle fibers run, which ends up being between a 90 to 120 degree angle. A simple yet effective exercise to implement this is by either laying on the floor or bench and raising your arms to make a wide Y shape. If this is too difficult, though you can make it easier by using an incline bench. While research shows that performing these with your shoulder internally rotated so thumbs down leads to slightly greater activation of the lower traps, this may not be the most comfortable position for everyone. Try it with thumbs down or thumbs up and see which best engages your lower trap muscles. Another great way to train this muscle is to utilize cables or a band, since it helps provide constant tension throughout each rep. To do so, set up a cable to about waist level and grab the right cable with your left hand and vice versa. To crisscross, brace your core and squeeze your glutes to prevent your lower back from marching, and then raise your arms up in that same Y shape at about 120 degrees. Before we dive into how to actually implement these back exercises, we need to cover the last area, the lower back. Research has actually shown that these muscles are already highly activated whenever we do compound lifts like rows, squats and deadlifts. Despite this, including some form of isolation work for the lower back can be beneficial if you don't do many of these lifts or if your lower back seems to be a weak link, limiting your strength in these key movements. To do so, we're going to use back extensions, but it's important that you get the setup right to maximize this benefit, start by positioning your pelvis at the top of the pad or just past it. Then you're going to lower yourself down to the bottom position while keeping a neutral spine and then raise back up but avoid going into hyperextension. Instead, stop once your torso is in line with your legs and no further. Now is the most important part. Putting together everything you learn into a balance back routine that works for you. Here's what I recommend. Pick two exercises from the upper back category, two exercises from the lats category, and then one exercise from the low lower traps category. Depending on your existing lower back training volume. You can choose to add in some back extensions to this as well. Here's an example of how you can do so if you have access to a gym. And here's an example if you only have dumbbells and you can choose to either throw all these exercises into one back workout per week, or sprinkle them into a couple of your workouts throughout the week instead, and anywhere between about three to five sets for each of the exercises will be the right amount of volume for most of you to maximize your back growth. But do experiment with it and see what works best for you. There is a lot of thought that goes into picking the right exercises as well as putting them together properly. Within my Built With Science programs though, I take care of all the guesswork for you by showing you exactly how to train and how to eat week after week based on your specific goal. To start today, just take my free 30 second quiz at built with science.com and I'll let you know which my step by step programs will best help you transform your body. To watch some more of my stuff, you can click here to grow your shoulders or you can click here to work on your six pack. Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.