Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 289: How to Build a Strong, Muscular, Back

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

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Welcome in everybody to another episode of the dynamic dialogue podcast. As always, I'm your host Danny Matranga. And in this episode, I'm going to be sharing 10 tips that I've picked up over the years that I like to implement for training my back, my clients backs, the athletes that we work with in our group program and online's backs. These are just some tried, true, battle-tested, evidence-based, anecdotally refined back training tips. So we're talking lower traps, upper traps, rear delts, lats, back pain, shoulder mobility, anything and everything that really emanates from developing a strong back. So whether you are new to fitness or you're a bodybuilder, there's probably something you have to learn here. And I can't

wait to chat with you more about back training and nuances. So sit back and enjoy the episode. This podcast has some awesome partners. And one of my favorite, of course, is Legion Athletics. Legion is my go-to supplement manufacturer for what I like to call my big rock supplements. This would be my protein powder, my pre-training formula, my post-training formula, and creatine, and my kind of ancillary vitamins and micronutrient protection. So why do I like Legion so much? What sets them apart? It's quite simple. Legion uses all natural ingredients. All the formulas include natural coloring and natural sweeteners. No artificial sweeteners, just stevia. And every single formulation, be it a pre-workout or a vitamin, contains

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Legion's pre-workout, but specifically the pre-workout that does not contain caffeine. That would be their Stim-Free Pulse. I'm a huge, huge fan of beta alanine and L-citrulline, but I don't like taking in wildly high amounts of caffeine. So if you are somebody who likes pre-workout with caffeine, you can try Pulse. Or if you like it without caffeine because you maybe want to enjoy your morning coffee or monitor your caffeine consumption, try the Pulse Stem Free. My favorite flavors there for sure are the new grape and the amazing, amazing tropical punch. As for my creatine, I get that from Legion's Recharge, five grams each and every day. I take it on the days I train as well as the days I do not because Recharge also contains L-carnitine,

which can help with promoting muscle recovery and decreasing soreness, as well as some ingredients to help with creatine utilization. And of course, my favorite supplements for my ancillary micronutrient health are Legion's Multivitamin and Legion's Greens Powder. Not only do these two products contain a ton of high quality vitamins and minerals, they also contain unique adaptogens like KSM-66 ashwagandha and reishi mushroom, which I like to take each and every day to promote my health. If you want to cover all your bases with a high quality protein, creatine, post-workout, or the ancillary micronutrient health stuff like greens, powders, and multivitamin,

I encourage you to go over to legionathletics.com and check out using the promo code Danny. That'll save you 20% on your first order and you'll rack up points that you can use the same way as cash every time you use the code and you'll also be supporting the show. Okay, folks. So the first tip I have when looking to develop your back is to pull and do pulling patterns from a variety of different angles. When we talk about back training, it's important to remember that your back is not just one big muscle. In fact, it's multiple different muscles, the largest of which are the lats and the traps, which can be divided into the upper and lower traps. But you also have small muscles like the teres, the rhomboids, the rear delts, even have muscles in your neck and that run up and along your spine. So there's a lot of muscles that make up your back and to train them adequately

and effectively for good mobility, good resilience, good hypertrophy, you're going to have to do a lot of pulling, but not just pulling in one plane, pulling from many different planes. So let's use lat pull downs as an example, or pull ups as an example, an exercise where your arms are overhead, and you're pulling the bar down to the chest or pulling the chest up to the bar. Movements that take place in that plane of motion, more vertical, are going to bias muscles like the lats compared to movements that might take place more horizontally, like a barbell row, a chest supported row, a one arm dumbbell row that will incorporate more of the traps, the rear delts and the spinal erectors. Now, all of these muscles are going to

be active to some degree, but the truth is for effective back training, you're going to need to do a variety of chest supported options, single arm options, two arm options. You'll often leverage things like cables. We'll talk more about these nuances as we go through the episode and just discuss the finer points of training the back. But training from many angles with many implements is the biggest and probably most leverageable tip I could give you for effective back training and back development. Okay, moving on to the second tip. And this is actually specific to one muscle and it is the rear delt. So not a lot of love is given to the rear delts. When training the deltoids, the front and the medial or lateral heads, get more action. Let's be honest. When you press, bench press, overhead press, you use a lot of front delt. When you front raise,

you use a lot of front delt. Typically, we see the lateral raise and the medial deltoid exercises that are, you know, in that category of lateral raises, be it machine, cable, dumbbell, get a lot of love, but many people don't spend a lot of time training the rear delts. They do retract the scapula, like the rhomboids and the traps, which if we're being honest, um, you know, that's, those are movements that we hit a lot with our rows. So it's not like you need to train these in isolation per se, but I think it makes a lot of sense to spend a little extra time developing the rear delts. So knowing that they play a role in external rotation, they play a big role in shoulder stability. And we train so much of the other heads of that muscle, training the rear delts a little

bit, sending some love to the rear delts can be a really, really valuable tool. An exercise I love for rear delts. This turns up in most of my clients programming or group programming are face pulls. I really like rear delt flies. You can use cables for these. You can use dumbbell rear delt flies, but I do like to include a pretty good amount of rear deltoid work, even though I know that the rear delts get trained pretty well with rows in the same way the front delts get trained pretty well with presses. I just think that thematically, there are a number of muscles that sit kind of on the backside of important joints. For example, the calves to the knee,

the glutes to the hip and low back, the rear delts and lower traps to the shoulder, that when they're strong and they are happy, I have noticed less injury prevalence amongst clients. So I am a big fan of incorporating the rear delts and rear delt specific exercises in both shoulder and back training so as not to neglect the oh so important muscle. The third tip I have for you with regards to back training has to do with one of the functions that I just mentioned, and that is external rotation. So there are a number of muscles that perform and play a role in external rotation. Typically, people have a tendency to be internally rotated, to be tight through the pec, to be weak in through the back and the external rotators.

But we have a variety of muscles that play a role in external rotation, specifically the rear deltoid or posterior deltoid, which we just mentioned, the teres minor and the infraspinatus. You might notice or remember the teres minor and the infraspinatus from studying the rotator cuff muscles. So, the other muscles of the rotator cuff, for example, subscapularis, those are internal rotators, muscles that move or medially rotate the shoulder. But those external rotators that we mentioned, the very important external rotators of the rear delt, the infraspinatus, and the teres minor. Those are muscles that oftentimes get quite weak because we don't train a lot of external rotation and

having them strong can be fabulous for shoulder function. Exercises I like for external rotation, of course, are things like face pulls, cable external rotation. I even like more dynamic forms of exercise like overhead sport, throwing, anything that involves spiking, med ball throws, things that force the shoulder into flexion. So you can use that overhead space, but I like flexion and external rotation. I like to see the shoulder go up and back just like a baseball pitcher. Now, do I need you to throw a hundred mile an hour fastball to be healthy? Absolutely not. That's unreasonable. But I do think having good flexion and external rotation capability at that joint across the lifespan will help you

train better, age better, feel better, move better. Not having good external rotation of the hip and of the shoulder are really common and it can be a number one cause of pain and dysfunction. So when you're training your back, remember, pull from lots of angles. Don't neglect the small muscles like the rear delts and incorporate lots of external rotation. Okay, tip number four. This is one that really blew my mind, especially in dealing with clients who have lower back pain, this is one that really blew my mind, especially in dealing with clients who have lower back pain. And that is that there isn't really muscles in your lower back. You do have erector muscles that run alongside the spine, pretty much the whole length of the back. And there are some people for whom a lat fiber or lat insertion might run really low. So their lats look like they begin super, super early.

A good example of this is bodybuilder Kai Green. Kai Green has a pretty remarkable back development, pretty incredibly low inserting lats. So it looks like he has lower back muscles. But the truth is most of the support for the lower back comes from intrinsic core muscles. For example, the transverse abdominis, glute fibers that run more, let's call it in language that makes sense for you guys, along the uppermost crest of the pelvis, so the highest glute fibers and the lowest fibers of the lats. Those muscles work together to create stability in the low back. So for a lot of people who have low back pain,

developing their mid to upper back using things like rows or exercises where the hips are very flexed and they're often hinged or loading those erectors, those can be kind of uncomfortable. I have found though that chest supported lightweight variations of rowing, developing the glutes, of course, the horizontal pulling and the development of the external rotators, all of these things can happen typically without agitating most forms of lower back pain, create strength, create stability in the low back by virtue of strengthening the lats, increasing blood flow to the tissue. It's interesting that for many people, lower back pain is so common, but training the back muscles doesn't really come to mind. A lot of people go right to stretching,

go right to mobility, they go right to core stability, and rightfully so. You know, those are very important and effective ways to manage back pain. I've said on this podcast many times, glute training is a great way to mitigate or manage back pain because strong glutes typically means better hip extension, typically means more stability through that low back. And you can get that from some of these upper back training, lat training exercises. And simply just going and performing a lot of hyperextension for the back isn't necessarily the best way to train that part of your body because there's not a lot of muscle there.

And I was shocked to learn that. It's mostly fascia in your low back. In fact, we call it the thoracolumbar fascia where the lumbar spine kind of runs into the thorax. There's this thick sheet of fascia that runs between the bottom of your lats and the top of your glutes. And a lot of your stability comes from those muscles creating tension through that fascia. Okay. So with back training specific for hypertrophy and muscle growth, one thing I've noticed is a little bit of spinal flexion and a big stretch actually isn't a bad thing. In fact, on my chest supported rowing exercises, I've been known to let my thoracic spine roll forward and we get a little bit of a thoracic, almost rebound, like what you see with a deadlift where the weight is pulling down on the arms

and the spine kind of rounds. I feel like a lot of times now when I'm doing my chest supported rows, my torso is rounding forward over the pad of the bench. I'm getting a big stretch in through my lats, in through my upper back. I'm feeling a big pump. And then I'm coming back into a contraction, not into hyperextension, but just to neutral. I'm paying more attention and being more careful of really getting a good stretch, of really allowing some degree of spinal flexion to take place. What's going on guys? Taking a break from this episode to tell you a little bit about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. More specifically, our app-based training. We partnered with Train Heroic to bring app-based training to you using the best technology and best user interface possible.

You can join either my Home Heroes team, or you can train from home with bands and dumbbells, or Elite Physique, which is a female bodybuilding-focused program where you can train at the gym with equipments designed specifically to help you develop strength, as well as the glutes, hamstrings, quads, and back. I have more teams coming planned for a variety of different fitness levels. But what's cool about this is when you join these programs, you get programming that's updated every single week, the sets to do, the reps to do, exercise tutorials filmed by me with me and my team. So you'll get my exact coaching expertise as to how to perform the movement, whether you're training at home or you're training in the gym. And again,

these teams are somewhat specific. So you'll find other members of those communities looking to pursue similar goals at similar fitness levels. You can chat, ask questions, upload form for form review, ask for substitutions. It's a really cool training community and you can try it completely free for seven days. Just click the link in the podcast description below. Can't wait to see you in the Core Coaching Collective, my app-based training community. Back to the show. This was something I used to never do. I used to be really quite paranoid about the potential dangers of, you know, overdoing spinal flexion. And rightfully so, you don't want that on a lot of exercises, especially things like heavy rows and deadlifts, because it could, quite honestly, expose you to something like a bulging

disc where you put a lot of tension on your flexed spine. But the mid-back, for example, the thoracic spine has a natural kyphotic shape. So in that, you get a little bit more wiggle on flexion. I have noticed that getting a big stretch and getting big flexion on my chest supported rowing exercises and even some of my cable exercises is working quite well for me. And I'm finding that it's a pretty effective and good tool for generating hypertrophy. I'm really, really enjoying it. I think it's good for mobility. I think it's good for training, not just to have good mobility in the shoulder. And of course the spine as it flexes and extends, but also just having good tissue resilience at end range. So play a little bit with light spinal flexion. And I say light, when I say light, I mean light. Be very,

very, very careful to not do this with exercises that you don't exactly have a lot of experience with. I think it makes, I think it makes a lot more sense to do this with machines and plate loaded options than it does with free weights or something like barbells. Okay. Another tip I have for developing the back on the kind of foot note of barbells versus machines and cables is use more machines and cables. The resistance profiles tend to be easier to handle high amounts of weight while keeping things as safe as possible because of the consistency we see with cables and kind of some of the, let's call it biomechanical thoughtfulness that's put into machine creation. Barbells and dumbbells are awesome, but they're probably very limiting for ultimately maximal back development because a lot of times you get

really tired in one position, meaning you can do a million more reps when the lat is lengthened, but you're too tired in the shortened position to do any more. So training to complete muscle exhaustion or not exhausting things like your spinal erectors and core or some of the intrinsic muscles around the low back before you do these big strong back muscles can be hard if you don't want to leverage things like machines and cables. Now, don't hear what I'm not saying. Some of the best backs ever were developed with mostly barbell movements, but I think for the average individual, having a plethora of movements that leverage the ability we have uniquely with cables and machines to pull in mechanically sound positions from a variety of different angles

without having a ton of skill or tissue resilience makes back training with machines and makes back training with plate loaded options cables really palatable and a really great choice for a lot of people. I can't recommend it enough. Some of my favorites are cable, obviously, lat pulldowns, cable rows, plate-loaded chest-supported rows, plate-loaded high rows, cable face pulls, straight arm pulldowns, half-kneeling cable rows. There are so many great cable options and ways to load with the cable for back that I do find myself recommending that and using that more. Now, tip number seven, specific to developing resilience in the low back and resilience along

the spine writ large, is that rowing from a hinged position is probably a good idea. And now I know I just said that these can be oftentimes compromising, but think about a barbell row where you're hinged at the hips, the hips are flexed, the bar is hanging in front of you, perhaps between the belly button and the nipple line. You are hinged. The weight is kind of floating between your shoulders and knees and your low back is doing a lot of the stabilizing. Now, if you have a weak low back or a low back that has pain, this is going to be an uncomfortable position and probably not the best way to train your back for optimal output because you're going to have to give something up on the top end with how difficult it likely is to have high output on an exercise like

this when you are in some type of pain, right? So, when you are not in some type of pain, if you do not have lower back pain, I think training in the hinged position, whether it be rowing, RDLs, deadlifts, are actually some of the best ways to stay pain-free, to stay out of pain, to build resilience. So long as your technique is good, so long as you're mindful, these positions can develop a lot of strength and resilience. And when you think about what people lose as they age, it's oftentimes the ability to get into those positions, to bend over. There's a high prevalence of quote unquote, throwing one's back out and being in pain and having low back pain. And while

doing these exercises when you have a lot of pain isn't easy, and maybe it's contraindicated, doing them when you don't might be the best way to stay out of back pain. My eighth tip here is don't neglect pull-ups. I love pull-ups even though they can be more efficiently replaced with something like a lat pull-down or a chest supported high row if you want to develop your lats. What can't be replaced is the beautiful action that happens at the shoulder when you're hanging from the bar at the bottom position, great for mobility. We call this a position of traction. The shoulders kind of get maximized, maximally extended up over the head. The capsule, the space within the capsule gets fully expressed.

You develop tremendous grip strength when doing pull-ups. This is true as well of anybody who's doing machine pull-ups or assisted banded pull-ups, things that essentially allow you to reach that dead hang position where you are still relying on a certain percentage of your grip strength to be able to do the movement. I think these movements are fabulous. Yes, they develop the back a lot, but they also develop fantastic mobility in through the shoulder, particularly up at the top position. They're great for developing your grip strength, which is super important to develop as you age and something that you don't want to take for granted. So I love exercises where you're hanging. I prefer pull-ups overhand or neutral through chin-ups, which are the palms facing you.

All three are good. I program all three regularly. I'm just slightly more inclined to program more chin-ups, or I'm sorry, more neutral grip pull-ups and more traditional overhand pull-ups. The eighth tip I have for you now, oh, I guess we're on the ninth tip, is to be sure to develop both the lower traps and upper traps. I have heard a lot of people not want to train their traps. They want to stay away from their traps and upper traps. I have heard a lot of people not want to train their traps. They want to stay away from their traps. They get worried when they feel their traps when they're training deltoids. And the truth is the upper traps are important muscles. For many people, they're tight and training them can bring with it fears and discomforts of perhaps

making them tighter. This is reasonable, but oftentimes overblown and sometimes tight muscles can still be weak. So training the upper trap by shrugging, hopefully from not directly at your sides, but slightly out or with exercises like face pulls or rows, you know, that can be a really good thing. The traps shouldn't be ignored in training just because you don't want to have big traps or just because let's say you're a little bit worried about neck tightness. Sometimes training a muscle, getting fluid in and out of it can be the best way to do it. But there's something else we need to discuss. And that is the whole other half of the muscle, which is the lower trap.

Perhaps one of the least talked about muscles. I think it's because it's deep to the lats, meaning you don't really see it. It's a triangle, a triangular muscle that kind of points down towards your butt crack. And essentially, it exists deep to the lats. It helps depress the scapula. It upwardly rotates the scapula. It does a lot of different things, including even a little bit of extension. So this is a muscle that when you sit a lot, a lot of times the lower traps get overstretched and they get kind of weak. And so it does downward rotation, right? Upward rotation, posterior tilting. It does some external rotation. This muscle does a lot.

And if it's weak, you're going to probably notice that your posture sucks a little bit. If you have low activity of the lower traps and overhead movement, it can lead to impingements. This has been shown in research. Substand, substandard activation, right? Lower trap strength decreases with people's, when people have neck pain. We've seen this in research. So, a lot of times what we can do to make our neck pain better, make our mobility better, is to train this muscle that we don't even see, that is the bottom half of the second largest muscle in your whole back, the lower traps, train it just a little bit because it's oftentimes so neglected and beautiful things happen when you

do. The 10th and final tip for training your back folks is don't panic if the sensations don't line up or show up right away. In 10 years of working with clients on back training, I've noticed that because you can't see your back when you train it most of the times, this is my hypothesis, that the sensation we get with like chest or abs or quads or shoulders, a lot of times isn't quite as strong. There's always a competing sensation with the forearms, with the biceps, with the grip, with the hands. the forearms, with the biceps, with the grip, with the hands. And so to better feel your back, be mindful, be thoughtful, control the entire range of motion, feel the stretch position, feel the contracted position. Don't be afraid to slow down. Don't be afraid to lose grips, or use grips. But also don't freak out if you don't feel tremendous sensation in training your

back. Because the truth is that takes time to develop and sensation isn't everything. Okay, folks. So, reviewing the 10 tips for a very well developed back that will be mobile, strong, and muscular throughout the lifespan are to remember to use different angles. Do not ignore muscles like the rear delts and the lower traps. Perform plenty of external rotation. Remember that low back stability comes from strength of the entire posterior chain and the core. Use lots of cables and machines. You can train in the hinged position to not just develop the back, but also resilience. Pull-ups are great for grip strength and mobility. The traps as a muscle are quite large and should not be neglected. And don't freak out if you can't feel things right away. All right, folks, I hope

you found this episode useful and helpful on your training, fitness and self-improvement journey. I want to break down as many complex topics with you as I can. And I hope you share this with anybody who you know that would benefit from learning more about training, nutrition, improvement, etc. If you want to help me grow the podcast, word of mouth and leaving reviews is the best way. So if you have not yet done this, leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It would help more people find the podcast and mean a lot to me. Thanks so much. you