How to Build Big Lats at Home

How to build big lats at home

Our lats or the latissimus dorsi is the largest muscle on our upper body and the perfect muscle to kick off the second half of our “build muscle at home series”, as we have just completed the muscles of the lower body.

Lats do more than just create an aesthetic physique. They are part of our core helping to stabilize our body and an important muscle anytime we need to pick up or pull something heavy.

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As we go through these exercises, I want you to think of the 2 main ways the lats work. The first one is to lower the arm in front of us that is called shoulder extension and shoulder adduction is the second one where we lower our arm down towards our sides.

I like to look at the direction the elbow is moving, is it coming down toward the front of our body or down toward the side of our body? Our workout programs should have exercises than work our lats using both movements.

Here I’m doing a side cable lat pulldown. It can help to develop the mind-muscle connection with the lats. This exercise can also be done unilaterally and with bands. Use an underhand grip, pulling your elbow down and holding it tight into your side for a second before raising your arm back up. We can do this exercise at the beginning of our workouts to warm up and wake up our lats.

The next exercise I like to use to warm up the lats is a straight arm pulldown with bands. You always want to get a full range of motion with a good stretch in the start position. In order to do this, you might have to lean forward in the start position until you feel the stretch then as you pull down slowly raise your body into the standing position. Giving you the best possible range of motion.

Dumbbell pullovers work more than just your lats. This exercise gives a good stretch in the chest, triceps and of course lats. It is my favourite exercise for working the lats in the stretched position.

You can do it either lying parallel on a bench which is easier to set up or you can position your body at a ninety to the bench, resting your shoulders on the bench. When you do it this way with your hips dropped I find you get a better stretch.

Any of these exercises I’ve talked about so far could also be used as finishers as well.

Bent over rows are a great mass builder. There are a few things we should watch for whether we are doing them standing or with one leg kneeling on a bench. First, we need to make sure our back remains in a neutral position and we are not rounding it. Then we want to row with our elbow close to are sides to target the lat if we have our elbow out it will put the emphasis on our upper back.

Next, as our elbow rotates up and back the dumbbell should follow moving back towards our hips. If we are pulling the weight straight up we are using more bicep and not lining up the weight with our lats putting more of the emphasis on the upper back. With bands, you don’t have to do the rows bent over, but other than that the same queues apply.

Chin-ups and pull-ups are great exercises for targeting our lats, but they hit our lats in 2 different ways. With the chin-up primarily using shoulder extension and pull-ups using shoulder adduction.

Chin-ups work the back a little more like bent-over rows except they have a greater range of motion and work the biceps more. With pull-ups, I would encourage you to use as wide a grip as possible. When training at home those pull up bars that go in our doorway don’t allow us much width so a trip to the local playground is worth it when whenever you get a chance.

A good way to imitate the movement of a pull up is a band pulldown. One of the advantages of this movement is you can move your hands apart as you pull the band down giving you a greater range of motion and a full contraction in the bottom position. It is important to makes sure your upper body is in line with the bands when targeting the lats because if your standing straight with the bands in front it turns into an elbow out row which works the muscles in your upper back instead.

Nothing complements a nice wide back like 3 D shoulders and great arms. Watch this video next to see how you can get complete arm and shoulder development with resistance bands. So you can keep working out while having fun