Gym Convos: Nice Back

At my gym — the place where I go to work out by myself —people know me as the calisthenics guy, or the guy with his nose deep in his workout log. When they find out that I am a trainer, I get all sorts of questions typically around mobility, stretching, diet, abs, and etc. Recently, after 20 minutes of sauna and 10 minutes of hot tub at the gym, I was approached by a guy in his twenties, who as asked a question I’d never heard before: “How did you get your back to look like wings?”

So I told him my back training secret. It’s not avian genetics, it’s not a bird-inspired work-out, or hours and hours of practicing the Chicken Dance. The secret is…there is no secret. All it takes is hanging on a bar, pulling up, and doing it over and over (and over, and over) again.

It’s pretty simple, but there are few equally important things to keep in mind when it comes to back training.

1. Make sure of course you are working the big muscles like the lats and rhomboids—muscle between the shoulder blades; they will give you the V-shape you want.

2. Train the little muscles around the shoulders. Neglect them and it could lead to rotator cuff strain—that means not being able to lift your are arms up to the sides.

So, what do I do on my upper body training days? Here’s the breakdown:

I start my warm-up using a PVC pipe to do shoulder dislocates and in-locates.

Then, I move on to do shoulder activation drills with a light SpriBand, which consist of reverse flyes, band Maltese, shoulder overhead flexion, external scarecrow and adducted elbow shoulder rotations.

One day I aim to sprout my wings and fly into the sunset like a Maltese falcon. Until then, I’ll just keep going with my SpriBand.