How many reps lat pulldowns

Pulling the bar way past your chest and almost in line with your stomach takes almost all the tension away from the lats and back. You can avoid this by keeping your chest high and stopping when you reach your upper chest. Keep your chest upright and maintain a good posture.

Keep as stationary as possible throughout. This is a clear sign the weight is too heavy for you. As you pull the weight down your shoulders will lurch forward like a shrug. During the movement, your shoulder blades should actually stay down, with your elbows by your side. Try incorporating sets of repetitions of this exercise into your routine; you could also add drop-sets into your plan when using the lat pulldown resistance machine to increase the intensity!

Grasp the bar with a wide grip, looking forward with your torso upright. Retract your shoulder blades and pull the bar down in front of you to your upper chest. Squeeze your lats at the bottom of the move. Resist the temptation to lean back to aid the movement. To ensure your back gets a tough enough workout, reduce the weight once your grip goes so that you can continue with the move and aim for a high rep count that will continue to challenge your lat muscles.

By changing to an underhand grip you recruit your biceps to help with the movement, which has the added benefit of taking some of the load off your lats if they are tiring towards the end of a back workout.

Holding the bar with that underhand grip, pull it down to below chin height, keeping your chest up throughout. Pause at the bottom of the movement, then take the bar back up under control. The wider your grip, the more the lats have to work during the exercise.

Your grip should be fairly wide even with the standard version of the lat pull-down, but with this variation you take your hands right to the ends of the bar.

So, whether or not you are doing a heavy or light lat pulldown, you will always be training something. Just be aware that there are linear progression limits to whatever exercises you choose. For the purpose of this article, I will define light as any weight with which you can complete more than 20 reps. Since the weight is light, it is easier to maintain the proper postural form mentioned above, and therefore the exercise becomes safer for your shoulders.

Choosing a lighter weight allows you to complete more reps before failure, working on muscle endurance. This can be similar to not feeling sore after squats. Lastly, a light weight allows you some flexibility to experiment with different hand positions such as wide or narrow hold an underhand or overhand grip.

On the flip side, since the weight is light, you may not achieve the appropriate muscle fiber recruitment necessary for increased strength. This is one reason why your biceps might be tired from the lat pulldown. This communication between your brain and your muscles is referred to as neuromuscular and improves with training. Strength is simply a function of neuromuscular adaptation to heavy loads and can only happen when weights are heavy enough.

Beardsley, Chris. Even if your goal is not raw strength, using too light of weight may prevent you from achieving hypertrophy results as well. This is where you can get stronger while cutting in the short term. Choosing a weight for the lat pulldown that allows you to complete at least two reps but no more than five reps will result in the neuromuscular adaptation needed to increase pulling strength.

Another advantage of heavier weight and fewer reps is the workout will take less time to complete since performing five reps takes about a quarter of the time needed to perform 20 reps assuming constant tempo. A heavy lat pulldown better prepares you for the effort needed to complete an unassisted pull-up. If your goal is to look better naked, you most likely want hypertrophic results and should choose a moderate weight that allows you to perform at least eight reps but no more than 15 in a set.

Perhaps the most importing disadvantage of doing heavy weight on the lat pulldown is the risk of injury or compromise at the shoulder joint due to bad form. Failure to properly activate the rhomboids and mid-trapezius first with good posture puts too heavy of a strain on the smaller rotator cuff muscles and could result in damage over time. Occhipinti, Mark. I see it at least once every time I walk into a gym - someone doing the lat pulldown with rounded shoulders.

This version of the lat pulldown became popular for some reason, but it is not safe for your shoulder joint.

Research showed that a narrow or shoulder-width pronated grip activates more biceps brachii compared to the wide grip. They all have very similar muscle activation for the lats, traps, and infraspinatus. Research showed that a pronated lat pulldown will activate your lats more than a supinated lat pulldown. A conventional lat pulldown requires degrees of hip flexion, which is essentially sitting with your back straight. If you lean too far back, you will change the exercise into a seated row, since the bar will be more in line with your chest than above your head.

The best approach is to either sit up straight or with a very slight lean so that you can activate your lats as you perform the lat pulldown. But it should be standard that there is a lat pulldown weight range if you want to target strength, endurance, or hypertrophy:.

To figure out your starting point, you need to perform the lat pulldown and have a reference number for yourself. Choose a weight that allows you to safely perform 10 repetitions, where the last 2 repetitions are very challenging. Remember to continually increase your weights as you adapt to the training to stay within that rep range.

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