Here's my back training from this week. First I'll kind of go into how I structure my training, rotate certain exercises, and progress without fatiguing or "over training"

Right now I'm on a 9 day training split.... It looks like this

  • Shoulders/Traps
  • off
  • Back/Rear delts/Bicpes
  • off
  • Chest/triceps
  • off
  • Secondary back and rear detls
  • off
  • legs

Rest one day then repeat. This does two things one it gives me 2 additional days of rest in-between hitting legs which I need because they aren't as conditioned as they need to be. Meaning low-moderate volume is causing a significant decrease in recovery time. I cant increase volume until I'm able to recover and my legs adapt to the stress.  To many people continually increase volume or progressively overload weekly without question. What if the same load or volume creates significant growth shouldn't you still use it until you fully adapt?

I rotate the squat, bench and deadlift. However, most often because of training specificity related to hypertrophy these will be modified to fit REP and RPE needs. SO it goes as follows....

Bench-

  • Incline Barbell, Incline Barbell with Shoulder Saver pad, Reverse band incline barbell, smith incline barbell) This goes from less stressed to most stressed in terms of load.

Back

  • Banded Rack Deadlifts from shin height, Deadlift variation, Bent Rows, T-bar Rows. Now you can see here this is the reverse order in terms of load and difficulty (stress) of the movement). This is done so it falls in line with the stress of the exercise from bench. This is done for 4 weeks and then reversed.

Legs

  • SSB variation, Barbell Squat, Belt Hip Squat, Banded Leg Press. For legs I look at it in terms of mechanical difficulty. I progress from most mechanically difficult to least mechanically difficult. This might vary for some but the point is obvious.

Shoulders run a 4 week wave of increasing density. This doesn't necessarily mean progressive overload. It just means more volume or a decrease in training time, or more completed in the same amount of time.

If I still feel fresh after 4 week wave ill continue the same wave and progress with weight. This is where progressive overload comes into play. Your continually getting new stress by varying the exercises and then circling back in week 5 to progress actual weight.

So here is what I did for back this week.

1. Meadows Rows: worked up in sets of 8 until I reached a difficult 8 and then did 4 working sets at that weight. That was 4, 25's and a 10. This was enough to create a pump, establish the mind muscle connection but not kill the remaining of training. This worked the muscle in a shorter range of motion. It is my opinion that most first exercises should be performed in the shortened range before moving to lengthen the tissue under load.

2. Next, after the tissues have been warmed up, we moved to a middle range movement. Its not a short range of motion nor excessively over stretched and we focus on weight.  I used a plated loaded single arm hammer row. I did this from a dead stop as well to control the stretch. These were progressive sets of 10 until I felt I was going to sacrifice form. I believe I worked up to 5 plates per side.

3. Now we stretch the shit out of the muscle. For this, higher rep ranges and short rest periods work well. I used the old school lat pull over machine for this. I hit 4 sets of 12-15. The goal was controlled eccentric loading stretching the muscle and then hard contractions.

4. Here we overload the movement. Depending where I am in season (off-season, prep, bridging cycles) this exercises comes later in the exercise of sooner. Banded Rack deadlifts from shin height were used in a 5x5 protocol. Moderate volume works great towards the end of the workout. You can execute and focus form/technique without the weight being to heavy bc of high reps. 4 plates per side plus 100-200 pounds of band tension, not sure.

5. Lastly , I ended with a modified stretcher. This is a cross between a pull down and a row. I did this to the upper back to really target the upper and mid traps as well as rear delts. 4 sets of 12-15.

Here are some videos of training. Its nothing fancy but pay close attention to the execution. There's a delicate balance between execution and load.