Building a huge back is a surefire way to give yourself an intimidating silhouette and to increase your performance on a number of different exercises. It’s also crucial for balancing out your posture if when you’ve built massive pecs. Forgetting to train lats and traps is unfortunately all too common a problem for amateur bodybuilders though, so let’s take a look at this brilliant ‘Blood and Guts’ workout from Dorian Yates.
Contents
Watch the Video Below for this Amazing Back Workout with IFBB Pro Dorian Yates:
Dumbbell Pullover
The workout starts with two ‘warm up sets’ and one working set with the dumbbell pullover. Perform 8-10 reps to failure and take a one minute break in between. This exercise is a fantastic one for training the lats.
Lie back on a bench which your head towards the end, hold a single dumbbell with both hands, and then let it lower to the ground with your arms stretched out behind your head. Let the weight dip down, the pull it back up to raise it further from the ground. The movement looks like a dumbbell skull crusher, except you’re using your lats more than your triceps and really feeling the stretch across your back.
Using warm up sets will not only help to avoid injury, but will get blood flowing to all the right areas thus ensuring that you can perform optimally and pump out the maximum number of repetitions.
Close Grip Pull Downs
Close grip pull downs can be performed on the lat pull down, using a handle that will allow you to keep your hands and arms close together. Try to keep your back straight and feel it working your lats. Use 8-10 reps, one warm up set and one working set. Pause for one minute in between and avoid using your body weight to pull the weights down.
One Arm Row
Again you’ll be using a warm up set and a working set. This is a bent over row, so you’ll place one knee and one hand on a flat bench and then pull the weight up from the floor with your free arm. This is a unilateral movement meaning you’re hitting one arm at a time. This makes it great for ensuring symmetry on either side of the lats.
10-12 reps, one warm up set and one working set.
Wide Grip Cable Row
Moving on to wide grip cable row, you’ll be performing a similar movement to the close grip pull down, except you’ll be changing the angle of the resistance while also changing the range of motion to make sure you’re using the entirety of your lats.
Use 8-10 reps to failure and use one warm up set and one working set.
Barbell Deadlift
With the same rep and set structure, we’ll this time be using a powerful compound movement in order to trigger a hormonal response and hit the lower back and traps as well as the lats. Make sure to use perfect technique keeping your back straight at all times and avoiding using too much weight.
