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Bringing Sexy Back #2 - The Exercises

The first post in this series went over the reasons why all women should work on their back muscles as well as the basics needed to get a sexy back. In this second post we will go over the best exercises for the back as well as discussing some more of the important aspects to putting together a back routine.

Back Exercises Technique
The back is one of my favourite areas to train because the exercises are so challenging. Initially, however, I hated doing the back because the exercises were so hard to perfrom properly. I cannot stress enough how important it is to make sure your technique is perfect. If your technique is poor, your results will be too.

As I mentioned in the last post, get a trainer to teach you and then watch you until you are confident and only use light weights for the first few weeks.

Top 5 Women’s Back Exercises

The top five back exercises are those that I use on a regular basis. Usually I include all of them in my routine and just swap the order that I perform them in each week. This keeps the muscles guessing and forces them to adapt.

# 1 - The Chin Up
Many women overlook the chin up because the simply cannot do them. It is an amazing exercise that targets your lats, rhomboids and biceps the most.

When doing a chin up, keep the motion nice a slow and always make the downward motion longer than the pulling up part. This will boost your strength and progress.

# 2 - The deadlift
This is one of those exercises that all the professionals talk about and encourage everyone to do but no one does it because it is so draining. The technique for the deadlift has to be perfect or you can do some serious damage to your spine.

The deadlift works your upper and lower back nicely as well as hitting your butt, hamstrings and shoulders. Start off with a light weight and progress very gradually. Experiment with different grips and feet placements to ensure you are targetting the correct areas.

# 3 - The Bent Over Row
This is a favourite with many women because it is quite easy to do. I love this exercise because using the free weight bar bell allows me to alter the tension on my back muscles by shifting my grip or the angle at which my upper body is at. Again, by shifting your grip or body placement you can target entirely different areas of your back. You probably could get a complete back workout with just this exercise.

# 4 - The Seated Dumb Bell Row
This exercise is done with your hand and knee on a bench using a medium heavy dumb bell. It is safer than most back exercises and doing one arm at a time allows you to focus your attention on getting your technique perfect.

It is important with this exercise to allow your arm to stretch the whole way down and to concentrate on tensing your lats as you pull the weight back up. Your elbow need only go just past your back at the top of the motion, it is not like you are trying to elbow someone behind you!

# 5 - Lat Pull Down Machine
Now, I am not a big fan of machines but this one is a little bit different to most machines in that it allows you to work quite a few muscles at once. The lat pull down is a compound exercise and works your shoulders, lats, rhomboids and biceps in one very easy motion. It is quite hard to muck this ones up.

Women’s Back Routine

Using these five exercises you can make up your own routine using the following principles and tips:

1. Each week alternate which exercise you do first. Your first exercise will always be your best and by alternating weekly you will build up strength in different areas as oppsed to just those targetted on one exercise.
2. Keep the repetitions around 10-15 until you have perfected your technique and then add weight each week until you are around 6-8 reps for each exercise.
3. Warm up with light weights first.
4. Stretch before, during and after each back workout.
5. Keep rest inbetween sets to a minimum - no more than 45 seconds.
6. Don’t do more than three or four sets for each exercise.
7. Make each rep slow and controlled.

Conclusion
Thats it for the women’s back workout for now. I’d love to hear of any other exercises women out there are using and enjoying. Does anyone brave the deadlift out there?

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