Last week we discussed the back muscles...specifically your traps. Today I want to offer a few exercises that target the traps and will help you to counter the normal problems with hunched shoulders and tight painful traps in your mid back and lower neck area.
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OK, let's get started with one arm dumbbell rows
First, you want to select a weight that is appropriate for your current level of strength. However, the key at first is to develop confidence in your balance, strength level, and proper technique. Unless you have been lifting for several months, do as the above video recommends and use a bench as a platform for the opposite arm and leg. Please notice from the video, how he extends his floor foot out about 12"-18" from the bench. Look around you at the gym and you will see people doing this exercise all the time with the floor foot almost direct against the bench. If you are just beginning, take the extra precaution and add stability to your stance by moving the foot away from the bench and thus you have a more stable tripod.
Also, notice how the back remains flat and the movement begins. No arching of the back... no shifting in the position. Your neck stays in alignment with the back. Don't shift your focus back to the weights or watch your biceps bulge. Just concentrate on keeping your shoulders pulled back and down and at the top of the row, pause for a two count, squeeze the traps and then slowly lower the weight under control. If you just drop the weight back down too quickly and let the momentum of the falling weight dictate your speed, you are partially defeating the purpose of the row.
As your arm extends downward, don't allow your arm to lockout. Keep the elbow slightly flexed. If you allow the arm to fully extend and lockout, you lose the tension on the back as the arm simply hangs with the weight. This places most of the load on the shoulders. Plus, once you begin to advance to heavier weights, you are placing too much stress on the elbow joint. Make the exercise work for you. Yes, it may mean that you can perform less reps since your traps will tire more quickly but that is better than performing 20 reps with poor technique.
Why Perform Rows?
As I mentioned last week, we need to strength the muscles around your spine to maintain great posture, balance any overtraining of your chest area, reduce pain from long hours at the computer, and finally to provide a higher plateau for muscle strength in case you develop other conditions as you age that makes further exercises very limited. Remember that after age 40 for most of us, we begin to lose about 1% of our muscle mass each year if you are like many Americans and are sedentary.
How often should you perform rows or other similar pulling exercises? That depends on your chest exercises and any imbalance that already exists.
Go to any gym today and watch how the men flock to the bench press. They are working their chest and arms but with special emphasis on their pecs. Dumbbell flys are also a very common exercise for this area if the gym doesn't have a pec machine. Think about this for a minute. The average 200# man can bench press 150-200#'s a few reps. Or they can pump out 10 quick full body pushups. With a pushup performed on your toes, a 200# man is really lifting 140-160#'s. Normally it is about 75% of the body weight. Yet, when they go to perform rows with a dumbbell, they only grab a 20-25# weight. Doesn't this seem odd! And yet they'll only do 12 reps, maybe 3 sets (if that) and their rhoms and traps are burning like hot coals. What's the problem?
Part of the answer is in the shoulder area. Men especially but it also includes women seem to forget the many smaller muscles around the delts. As I continue to strengthen the more I exercise, I realize how important it is to develop a solid base level for the delts and their support muscles in the shoulder area. Again, we tend to glorify the biceps, the arms overall, and the chest to the exclusion of the back and the delts.
Doesn't it make sense that if you can push 150#'s off your chest with a bench press that you should be able to work with a 50-60# dumbbell on a single arm row. But, you never see it. Just picking up a 60# dumbbell is tough...right! Yet, I am convinced that if you can pump a 150# bench press, it should be possible to strengthen the back and the shoulder area to handle this much weight.
Now, I'm not recommending that you immediately go our and try to perform 3 sets of one arm rows with 60#'s. That would be foolish for 99% of us. Yet, we perform 3 sets with 20# dumbbells and think we have sufficiently trained our backs. Not so!
Most exercise sites will recommend that you train your back on the same day as you train your chest area so that you can maintain a balance front/back strength. I've never seem it in print but I would suggest that the back needs more training than the chest. Build up the delt area and its many smaller muscles first but maybe perform 4 sets of single arm rows with each arm and only two sets of bench presses with 150#'s.
I mentioned a few months ago that I have continued to perform dumbbells front raises and side raises to help me with standing miltary presses. My wife makes me hide them from her to keep the den neater, but I keep a pair of 10# and 12# dumbbells beside my chair where I watch TV. At night, I normally do 3 sets of each exercise with the weights. Then during the lifting days in the basement, I can now use 15# and 20# dumbbells where 6-8 months ago, I couldn't have use this much weight. It has also helped my bench press as well.
As a kid, I grew up on a farm and my family also had a large general store that sold almost everything. Across the street from the store, we had a block building for storing farm (mainly tobacco) chemicals and loads of fertilizer. At that time, the fertilizer was sold in 200# burlap sacks. We never had a loader. Everything was done by hand although we did have two very old fertilizer carts that were concave in the back to accept the typical 200# bag curvature. The back were high so that if you were man enough, you could double stack the bags. As a kid, I never did that but my dad always did. No fork lifts in the building and limited floor space meant that we had to double stack all the 200# bags to free up space for more merchandise. To this day, I can remember my dad working up a sweat in the warehouse when he was unloading a truck. He would wheel the 400#'s to the right row and then grab the "ears" of the 200# sacks and shift them into place. To place the bags into double stack position, he would simply lift the bag off the floor about 2 ft and then with a loud grunt, he would use his upper leg area and his upper body to shift the heavy weight into the upper position which was about 36-42" high. Today, someone would never do this type of labor. One, we aren't fit and two, the liability risks for back injury would be too great.
Ok, enough thinking about old times. Time to end this diary. I hope you enjoyed reading and maybe it gave you something to mull over for the week. Thanks for reading.