A well-developed back will set you apart from almost everyone else in the gym. The back is a complex group of many muscles. To train it properly is hard work. Because you can’t see your back, it’s easy to ignore it and focus on muscles that you can see, such as the chest, shoulders and arms. Don’t make that mistake. When you neglect training your back, you run the risk of developing a strength imbalance between the front and back of your body. Over time, this can easily lead to an injury - especially in the shoulder joint or shoulder girdle.

Although there are plenty of mistakes that people make when training their back, here are three of the most common.

Mistake #1: Turning a pulldown into a row

To build your back, your workout routines should include both pulling and rowing movements. Examples of pulling movements include the chin-up and lat-pulldown. Two good rowing movements are the dumbbell and barbell row. However, many people try and combine the two when they do pulldowns. They use so much weight, that their backs are often facing the ground at the end of the movement. That’s not a pulldown! Nor is it a row. Rather, it’s the ego getting in the way of a good back workout. With lat-pulldowns, you can lean back slightly while lifting your chest and squeezing your lats at the bottom of the movement (when the bar is touching your chest). However, don’t turn the movement into a row. If this is a mistake you’re making, reduce the weight, and focus on correct technique. Otherwise you’re wasting your time.

Mistake #2: Going too heavy with rowing movements

There are plenty of guys, for instance, who can lift 100 pounds or more in the dumbbell row. However, when you watch them at work, you’ll see them swinging and jerking the bar up to their chest. Their form is nothing short of terrible. When you swing or jerk a heavy weight, there’s no way you can feel the muscle working. When you’re doing any back exercise, you should pause at the top and bottom position of the movement. During the dumbbell row, for example, when you lift the weight to your chest, hold it there for a split second. Then, as you lower it towards the floor, make sure to pause in the bottom position while you feel the stretch in your lats. Don’t fall into the trap of using heavy weights and poor technique. It won’t work.

Mistake #3: Ignoring post-exercise nutrition

When you train your back properly, you set in motion a series of complex biological processes that ultimately leads to a bigger, stronger back. Provided, that is, you give your body the nutrients it needs to recover and grow in the crucial period after exercise. If your body doesn’t get these nutrients, you’ll never make the progress you deserve. Although the consumption of carbohydrate after exercise is extremely important, and is now accepted by most experts to be vital for speeding up recovery (glycogen resynthesis), the timing of protein intake is also absolutely critical. Carefully controlled scientific studies show that a combination of protein and carbohydrate consumed immediately after exercise is more anabolic than the same nutrients eaten 1-3 hours later [1,2].

More interesting still, publishing their findings in the Journal of Physiology, Birgitte Esmarck and her colleagues have shown that delaying the consumption of a meal for two hours after exercise limits the increase in muscle growth during a weight-training program [3]. When the meal was taken immediately after exercise, muscle growth was greatly increased.

One of the easiest ways to provide your body with the essential nutrients it needs to gain weight and grow is by taking a weight gainer (e.g. Progain by Maximuscle) after you train.

References
1. Levenhagen, D.K., Gresham, J.D., Carlson, M.G., Maron, D.J., Borel, M.J., & Flakoll, P.J. (2001). Postexercise nutrient intake timing in humans is critical to recovery of leg glucose and protein homeostasis. American Journal of Physiology, E280, 982-993
2. Rasmussen, B.B., Tipton, K.D., Miller, S.L., Wolf, S.E., & Wolfe, R.R. (2000). An oral essential amino acid-carbohydrate supplement enhances muscle protein anabolism after resistance exercise. Journal of Applied Physiology, 88, 386-392
3. Esmarck, B., Andersen, J.L., Olsen, S., Richter, E.A., Mizuno, M., & Kjaer, M. (2001). Timing of postexercise protein intake is important for muscle hypertrophy with resistance training in elderly humans. Journal of Physiology, 535, 301-311