If you want to look more muscular, move better, have better posture, and live without pain you need to get a stronger back.

The problem is that the back isn’t just one muscle.

Your “back” is a series of connected muscles.  I mean it’s basically half your body- from your neck down to your butt. 

Those various muscles play a role in shoulder health, hip health, spine health, and almost every other major function of your body besides flexing your toes.

Basically the stronger your back is the stronger you will be.

On your back the largest muscle is your latissimus dorsi. Or your lats.

They’re actually the widest muscle in your body, they fan out from your lower back to your upper arm.  They have a lot of important functions like helping your shoulder move and helping you breathe deeply.

They’re an important muscle that when targeted will not only help you look stronger, but they’ll help you function better and with less pain.

There are a lot of ways to train your lats. You can do pull ups, or you can do lat pull downs. You can even change the angle of a DB row to specifically target your lats.

But all of these movements are missing a very key component to building your lats.

They don’t train your lats through their entire range of motion.

And they don’t keep tension on the muscle throughout the entire movement.

The Straight Arm Lat Pull Down is an exercise that will fix both of those problems.

It’s a band or a cable movement that takes your lats through their entire range of motion- from fully stretched with your arms overhead to fully flexed with your arms by your hips. 

The nature of the movement and the setup also allows us to keep tension on the lats at every portion of the movement so you can get more bang for your buck.

Muscles grow in response to high mechanical tension. The latissimus dorsi can produce the most tension during shoulder extension, which is the exact plane of movement this exercise works.

How to do it:

• Set up a band on a pull up bar or a cable machine above your head
  Position yourself either standing or kneeling in front of a cable machine or a band attached to a pull up bar

• Shift your hips slightly backwards as you lean forward. 

• With straight arms pull the rope/handle/band down towards your hips

• In the bottom position your elbows should be even with your ribs

• Slowly raise your arms back to the starting position

The Straight Arm Lat Pulldown is a great addition to any program, as it makes almost everything better. 

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