00:00Okay, welcome everyone to episode number two of the Science Applied series, where my goal is to
00:05borrow from the anatomy, biomechanics, and some of the exercise selection science from my Science
00:10Explained series, and package that into discrete workouts that you guys can go and apply in the
00:16gym right away. So in this episode, we're going to be covering a pull workout. We're going to be
00:21hitting mainly the back, biceps, and rear delts. And again, this is meant to be worked into a push-pull
00:26leg split, which would look something like this. So without further ado, let's dig right into today's
00:32workout. So we're going to be kicking things off with two sets of 15 to 20 light reps on the one-arm
00:38lat pull-in. And regular viewers will have probably seen me do these before. And the basic rationale
00:43here is to sort of pre-activate the lats. I think I should qualify that this isn't a term. You'll see
00:48much in the scientific literature, but it is based on scientifically sound principles. And most of the
00:53research on this has actually focused on the glutes, where in 2016, Fisher and colleagues found
00:59that doing glute pre-activation drills had activation carryover to heavier compound exercises
01:05like the hip thrust. And I think it stands to reason that these neural changes should also apply to the
01:10lats, especially since a lot of people really struggle with establishing a mind-muscle connection
01:14with them. And I think the mind-muscle connection is accumulating empirical support lately, with one study
01:18published just this month finding that using internal focus, or in other words, just thinking about using
01:23the muscle that you're trying to activate led to greater biceps muscle thickness across an eight-week
01:28training program. And at the very least, I think doing these serves as an additional warm-up, helping
01:33to increase blood flow to the muscle, improving pumps, and potentially reducing injury. So in terms of
01:38execution here, I like to think of this movement as sort of the opposite of a lateral raise. So in a
01:43lateral raise, you'd think about raising your arm up and out to the side, something called shoulder
01:49abduction, while here you'll want to be performing pure shoulder adduction, so basically driving your
01:54elbow down and in towards your sides. And this should be happening in the mid-frontal plane, so you want
02:00to imagine driving your elbow down in the plane of motion that would evenly split your body into a front
02:05half and a back half. You can also crunch laterally into the direction of the pull for an even stronger
02:11lat contraction, since the lats do weakly contribute to lateral spinal flexion. And again, the idea here is to
02:17avoid failure. You just want to be using lightweight, mindful, purposeful lat contractions. Okay, so to
02:23get into the actual workout proper, we're going to start the main loading with three sets of six to
02:28eight reps on wide grip pull-ups. And while in 2013, Doma and colleagues found no significant
02:34differences in lat activation between the lat pull-down and the pull-up, the pull-up did come out
02:39on top for the biceps and the erector spinae. And given that we're trying to target all the pulling
02:44muscles in this workout, it stands to reason that you might get a little more bang for your buck with the pull-up,
02:50especially as a sort of main heavy movement, where the goal is generating maximum tension and overload.
02:55Also, pull-down machines can vary in terms of how they're loaded from gym to gym. So if you do tend to hop
03:01around from gym to gym, like I do, you might be better off going with the pull-up, which can be consistently
03:08applied from an overloading perspective, as long as you have a simple bar that you can hang off of.
03:14Also, I think if we're really being honest, pull-ups are just harder. And I think there's
03:17something to be said for taking on movements with higher degrees of difficulty at times.
03:22Now, since this is meant to be a heavy compound movement, body weight may not be enough to get
03:26you sufficiently close to failure in that six to eight rep range. So you can use a loading belt to
03:31add resistance as needed to get you in that target intensity zone, which should be somewhere around an
03:37RPE of eight or nine. So leaving about one to two reps in the tank per set. And you can optionally
03:42take your final set to failure if you really want to crank things up a notch. If you're newer to pull-ups
03:47or at a heavier body weight, there's no shame in using the pull-up assisted machine to get you more
03:52in that target intensity zone. So in terms of execution, I think the main two things to focus
03:57on are range of motion and tempo. So the goal here is to go all the way down to where your elbows are
04:02nearly fully extended, and then pull yourself up as high as you can comfortably go. Now, usually
04:07that means at least clearing your eyes over the bar, and you want to be aiming to bring your chest
04:12up to the bar, even if it doesn't actually touch it. And I should say you don't want to actually
04:16disengage at the bottom and enter a dead hang. You'll want to maintain some degree of tension and
04:21tightness at the bottom without shortchanging that bottom end of the rep. As for a tempo, you want
04:26a steady and controlled eccentric or negative, but still controlled concentric or positive. In a
04:32follow-up article to a 2015 systematic review and meta-analysis, Dr. Brad Schoenfeld wrote that
04:38a wide range of lifting durations or tempos can be used to maximize hypertrophy, but concentrics
04:44shouldn't last longer than three seconds, since slowing them down further may be detrimental to
04:49growth, and eccentrics should be performed so that the load is controlled against the forces of
04:54gravity, since simply letting the weight drop fails to provide sufficient muscular tension. So I think
04:59that while using a variety of tempos can make sense, for these heavy compound movements in
05:03particular, it's probably better to focus on loading them more heavily over time with a normal
05:08tempo, so say roughly a one-second concentric and one-second eccentric, with good control being the
05:15main criteria. Also between sets here, I like to do a little bit of stretching for the lats. I find this
05:20just helps get them a little more loosened up and allows me to get a little bit more of a pump,
05:24and there's no reason to think that if you're only holding these stretches for, say, five or six
05:28seconds between sets, that's not going to hinder your performance on subsequent work in any way.
05:34So up next, we're doing three sets of 10 to 12 reps on the Meadows row, and we can think of this
05:38as our main heavy row for this workout, and this movement has really grown on me lately for a few
05:43reasons. First, because you have the arm more out to the side, the plane of motion is basically
05:48directly in line with the fiber orientation of the mid-trap fibers, and you should be maximizing
05:54recruitment of the mid-traps and rhomboids here as you perform scapular retraction, squeezing your
05:59shoulder blades together. You're going to hit the rear delts pretty well too through transverse
06:03shoulder adduction, and while I haven't seen any research on the Meadows row itself, research from
06:08Lehman and colleagues showed that seated cable rows yielded greater lat activation than lat pulldowns,
06:14with more trap activation as well. Granted, seated rows are performed using a neutral grip and with
06:19shoulder extension, while Meadows rows are done with a pronated grip and horizontal shoulder
06:23adduction, but still, I think the point is that rows are really going to slam pretty much the whole
06:29back musculature, including the lats. So here I like to load using 25-pound plates, just so I can get a
06:35little extra range of motion at the bottom, and you want to stagger your stance so that you're able to
06:39row pretty much directly out to the side with a fairly flat back, meaning you're pretty
06:43bent over. At least, this is how I feel my mid-traps working the best. And you can also modify the
06:48exercise to be more lat-dominant by standing more side-on to the bar and rolling back. So it's almost
06:54like doing a dumbbell row, but with a barbell. So depending on your area of focus, lats, or traps,
07:01you can choose what way you're going to do these. Okay, so up next, we're doing three sets of 12-15 reps
07:06on the Omni-grip lat pulldown. So here we're going to be using three different grips, doing one set with a wide grip,
07:13one set with a medium grip, and then a reverse grip for the final set. And just looking at the research as
07:18a whole on this, now there isn't a strong trend for favoring wider or narrower grips for optimizing
07:23lat recruitment, but there is a large degree of individual variability, meaning in practice, using a variety of
07:29grip widths makes sense. And in 2010, Luskital showed that using a supinated, or underhand grip, was worse for
07:36recruiting the lats, but I think a plausible explanation for this is just increased biceps involvement
07:41with the underhand grip, leaving less work for the lats to do. And this is why I think the sequencing of grip
07:46variation is important. You want to start with a wide grip when your lats are most fresh, and then move into a closer grip,
07:52allowing the biceps to do a little more work as the lats accumulate fatigue. And then for the third set, you go with the
07:58reverse grip, getting the biceps even more involved. So this will basically allow you to maintain the same weight across all sets,
08:04while hitting the lats from slightly different angles, and ensuring you have sort of all of your bases covered.
08:10So up next, we're doing a rear delt tri-set of rope face pulls, reverse pec deck, and band pull-aparts,
08:17with minimal rest between these sets, just for the sake of squeezing in a good chunk of rear delt volume
08:23in a short period of time. With the rope face pull, you really want to think of this as a high row,
08:27and this is the main multi-joint movement of this tri-set. So you want to go fairly heavy here,
08:32and maybe use your foot as support against the upright, so you don't have to worry about any balance issues when loading heavily.
08:39And your goal is going to be hitting really everything that's back there, so the rear delts, the traps, and the rhomboids.
08:46So don't be afraid to squeeze your shoulder blades together hard on every rep.
08:49Now with the reverse pec deck, you'll want to load this a little bit less heavily, and get more of a mind muscle connection with the rear delts,
08:56as here we're trying to really isolate the rear delts. So you want to think about driving your arms out and back,
09:02using your rear delts, rather than trying to squeeze your shoulder blades together with the face pull.
09:06So we're trying to minimize trap involvement at this point. And when it comes to hand position,
09:11you might want to play around with both a pronated, or palms down grip, and a neutral grip with the palms facing each other.
09:17For what it's worth, one 2013 study found that the neutral grip was better for increasing average EMG activation,
09:23however some subjects saw more activation with the pronated grip. And I think I'd personally fall into
09:28that camp myself, since I do find I can get a better mind muscle connection with my palms facing down.
09:33And to complete the tri-set, we're doing band pull-aparts, and I didn't have the best band in the world for
09:38these, but really the goal is just to sort of burn out the rear delts, generate a high degree of local
09:43metabolic stress, and provide a slightly different tensile stimulus, where with the pec deck, there's pretty much
09:49consistent resistance throughout the range of motion, whereas with the band, we're getting peak
09:53tension at the top end of the range. And I personally like to externally rotate a little here as well,
09:58as the rear delts do assist with external rotation. Okay, so to just about round out the pulling
10:03muscles, we're going to be hitting three sets of six to eight reps on the easy bar bicep curl. And
10:09given just how much pulling volume we've already done, I wouldn't say that doing assistance biceps
10:14work is required here for biceps growth, but I would say that it's a good idea if you want to sort of
10:20optimize their progress. And since the biceps really only provide an assistance role in the
10:24other movements, they're not going to be taken to fatigue, and so I think it's important to hit
10:29them with some heavy weight here at the end. And I prefer the easy bar, just because I find it easier
10:34on my wrists, but you could also use the straight bar. And similar to the pull-down, there isn't much
10:38activation difference between medium and wide grips. However, some data suggests that a very close grip
10:43could decrease biceps involvement and could put unwanted strain on your wrists, so I'd avoid that
10:49if you can. And given that the long or outer head of the biceps contributes more to shoulder abduction,
10:55using a wider grip could lead to more involvement of that outer head, so I tend to favor this in my own
11:00training. I also like to use a little bit of moderate cheating on the last few reps, as long as I can
11:05maintain eccentric control just to ramp up the intensity a few notches with this movement. Now here,
11:11you can optionally add in two sets of 15 to 20 reps on the incline dumbbell curl, depending on
11:17how much arms are a priority for you. But the main idea here is to actually just fatigue the biceps
11:23with higher reps and get a greater degree of stretch on the biceps by having the arm back behind the
11:28torso. You want to keep your elbows back, keep your upper back against the bench, and do both arms at
11:33once to save on time and generate fatigue in a more efficient manner. And finally, to really finish
11:39things off, we're going to be doing three sets of six to eight reps on a below-the-knee rack pull.
11:45If you're going to include these on your pull day, I'd actually suggest modifying the split,
11:49so you have at least one day of recovery between doing these and any lower body work. So you can run
11:55it as a pull-push legs rest and repeat, since your lower back may not be ready for the heavy squatting
12:02or deadlifting on a leg day after doing these. But anyway, the main idea here is to get a good,
12:07heavy, isometric stretch on the upper traps and also involve the spinal erectors running all the
12:13way up the spinal column, keeping the spine extended and stabilized. Now, of course, here you could go
12:18with the above-the-knee rack pull, which I think will free up your lower back quite a bit, keep that
12:24from being a little bit too involved, and provide a little bit more of a loading stimulus on the upper
12:29traps, at least isometrically, since you will be able to load that exercise more heavily. However,
12:35I think that since we're trying to target more of the whole back musculature, I went with the below-the-knee
12:41rack pull on this one. And I think they'll also have a little more carry-over to deadlifts from the floor,
12:46which I don't include here because I tend to classify those as more of a lower body exercise than a back
12:52exercise. And you can feel free to use straps and a belt here. In my opinion, that'll only aid in the
12:57safety of this movement and allow you to move more weight, resulting in a greater tensile stimulus
13:02overall. And contrary to popular opinion, a belt doesn't really significantly impede involvement
13:07of much of the core musculature. So, in my experience, the upsides outweigh the downsides
13:13for using a belt on heavy sets of squats and deadlifts, and in this case, rack deadlifts.
13:18And again, here you want to avoid failure, so leave at least two to three reps in the tank,
13:22and focus on really perfecting your technique by first pulling the tension out of the bar
13:27before lifting, meaning you don't want to just walk up and yank it off the rack,
13:31and by focusing on keeping the bar centered over your mid-foot throughout the full range of motion
13:36as the chest and hips rise simultaneously. And to lock out, simply lift the chest up,
13:41and that's it. Okay, so guys, that's going to wrap up episode number two of the Science Applied series.
13:45I hope you guys really liked it. Before we go, I just want to say that, once again,
13:49I'm going to offer a discount on my back and my arm hypertrophy programs. So, those are two
13:55pull-focused training programs that you can get on my website. And if you want to save 30% off both
14:02of those programs, you can just use the discount Science Applied 2 at checkout, which will knock
14:08down the actual price to something like 15 or 20 bucks a piece. So, if you were thinking about
14:13getting these programs from me, now might be a time to grab them, show your support for the channel,
14:19and increase the amount of gains that you can make in your pull workouts in the process.
14:23Thanks again, guys, for watching. This was a highly requested video,
14:26so I hope that you guys liked it. You can stay tuned for part three coming next month. And until then,
14:32please leave me a like if you liked the video, subscribe to the channel if you're new,
14:35and I will see you guys all here next time.
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