While most people hitting the gym focus on what they see in the mirror, it is essential to work on back muscles for overall strength and fitness. Strengthening the back can take time, but having the benefits of a strong foundation are well worth the effort.
For performing compound exercises effectively and safely, a strong back is essential. This is the right place to know these exercises if you are searching for effective back exercises to build a bigger back. In this article, you’ll get seven best workout ideas to incorporate into your fitness routine. Before directly jumping to the workout ideas, let's begin by understanding the back muscles.
Back Muscles
Understanding the muscle anatomy is very crucial to target them with specific exercises. For example, there are three groups of back muscles – the superficial, the intermediate, and the deep muscles.
The movement of the shoulders is supported by the superficial back muscles such as the trapezoids, rhomboids, levator scapulae, and latissimus dorsi.
Intermediate back muscles such as the serratus posterior inferior and the serratus posterior superior support the movement of the rib cage.
Deep back muscles like the multifidus, semispinalis, and rotatores help maintain posture and move the vertebral column.
7 Workout Ideas
Go through the following back workout ideas and include them in your next back workout session.
- Lat Pulldowns
This is an excellent exercise to train your lats, biceps, and traps, even though it explicitly targets your lats. You can try many variations for keeping things fresh, and you’ll also get chiseled wings in your upper back. However, you must remember not to go too fast with this exercise as it can easily lead to rotator cuff injury.
- Pull-Ups
You can build a bigger back with this exercise. Pull-ups activate your core, shoulders, triceps, and forearms. With a wide overhand grip, you can target your back muscles. Your range of motion is restricted with a close grip, whereas too wide a grip may strain your shoulder joint.
- Deadlifts
This is one of the best compound exercises you can do for your back. It trains all the muscles in your posterior chain and allows you to use some heaviest weights in your workouts. Thus it helps in gaining strength and building muscles. While activating every muscle group in your body, it’ll give you that V-taper you’ve always wanted.
- Dumbbell Row
You can independently train each side of your body with this exercise. The one-arm dumbbell row allows you to lift more weight on each side than while doing barbell rows. Thus it leads to more progressive overload and gains. This back exercise activates your lats and traps. Since it targets your back muscles, it’s more effective than barbell rows.
- Seated Cable Row
You’ll require a cable machine for doing the seated cable rows. This exercise activates muscles in your back and gives your forearms a workout. During seated cable rows, the mid-back is given the hardest workout, particularly the latissimus dorsi. You must maintain your posture during this exercise since a rounded back can reduce effectiveness.
- Dumbbell Pullover
A dumbbell pullover is important for muscle growth because you can train your lats in a stretched position and through a full range of motion. If you are tired of pull-ups and lat pulldowns, you can try this new exercise with a dumbbell and a bench. In addition, you can try some variations of dumbbell pullovers such as Cable Pullover and Standing Lat Pushdown for back hypertrophy.
- Kettlebell Swings
With this exercise, we conclude our list of workout ideas for building a solid back. This exercise is less complicated than the above-listed moves. Kettlebell swings activate your whole posterior chain and are considered excellent for back training. You only need a kettlebell to do this exercise anywhere.
Working on your back muscles to get the ideal V-taper shape is not that easy. However, you can consider the exercises mentioned above and add them to your routine.
If your passion for such workouts is increasing and you’d like to work in this field, we have a solution. You can get certified with the American Sports & Fitness Association and pursue your passion for something more!
