How To Actually Target Your Lats With The Lat Pulldown!

What's up guys ?

This is Danny Rango with Mind Pump TV .

Today , I'm super excited to share with you some of my favorite tips and tricks that I picked up along the way in my years of training stuff that's really helped me and help my clients see success and progression inside and outside the gym .

Let's get into it to properly engage and recruit the lats with the lap pulled down .

There's a few nuances , we need to be aware of what muscles we start and engage from the beginning of the movement where our grip is where we set up , all that stuff is critical .

So I'm gonna talk to you guys about that right now .

I like to set up on the lap , pull down with my hands outside the bend of the bar .

Any bar you have is gonna have some bend to it .

You might have a straight bar , but most gyms don't .

So I actually like to set up with my thumbs right at where that bend occurs from there , sit down , making sure that my torso is upright and pull down to the top of the chest right within that pole .

There's a lot of things we need to be thinking about .

The first one is the position of the torso itself .

I like to line up with my chest directly under the bar .

You'll see some people lining up here that right away is gonna take the lats pretty well out of the movement .

You're gonna start to use some lower trap because again , instead of pulling the shoulder blades down , which is what we wanna do , we start to pull them back , which is gonna recruit some of the lower trap and take it away from the lat .

So your goal is to line up with your torso under the bar so that we can pull our shoulder blades down , repeating this motion down like so another nice tip is to actually lift your chest up as the bar gets down lower .

You'll notice that helps you better recruit and feel the lat as for what to do with your hands .

After you grip the bar , I actually like to visualize pulling my hands down like this like a big circle .

And that helps me again , fully control and fully flex my lats between this motion and pulling the shoulder blades down .

I'm gonna get a lot of lat activity .

So from the beginning , grip the bar right outside the curve stretching at the top , squeezing at the bottom .

That's what a properly performed a lap pull down should do .

And that's how you build that V look or that tapered look some nice landmarks for you to be able to kind of tie back to , to always make sure your laps are working or to start the movement again , making this loop and pulling the scapula or the short shoulder blade downward , right .

Our first movement should be a downward pull of the shoulder blade , not a tug with the biceps .

That's actually one of the biggest indicators that you do in this movement wrong is if you start to feel it too much in the forearms or the biceps or you start to feel yourself using momentum to carry the weight back .

So just making sure again , we're pulling the arms apart , shoulder blades are down , we're feeling it in our laps from the very beginning and the bar should finish somewhere across the , the mid chest above the nipple line , not quite at the clavicle .

If it finishes or anywhere in that region , you'll know you're doing it right .

If you start to feel it like hitting below your sternum or it's running into your clavicle neck area , you've got to find a spot for that bar to land because you're not pulling downward , align with the lats .

You're going to start to use things like the lower traps or other musculature that we don't want to use a final note on things like tempo range of motion , parts of the range of motion , stuff like that .

So the tempo of the exercise is again under control , we do not want to do this too fast .

If we start speeding up , you're gonna notice that you're using too much momentum and momentum is not a muscle .

We want to train , we want to target our LATS as for the range of motion during the concentric portion , right , or the downward phase where we shorten the muscle .

I want to make sure that I'm under control and fully squeezing my laps at the bottom , pausing for one or two seconds in the isometric or bottom position and then letting my LATS control the elevation of the bar back up and actually letting the shoulder blades continue to go up and stretch , right , that those cues kind of in and of themselves will give you all the things you need to know at the tempo again , making sure that we shorten at the bottom , hold long enough to feel our lats catch and then once the lats have caught , we want to make sure that they're the thing elevating the bar back up to the top position .

I hope you guys enjoyed this video .

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