You’ve seen them in the gym: The guys with underdeveloped physiques and overdeveloped egos busily working on their “vanity” muscles—pumping their pecs and blasting their biceps—in hopes of impressing the opposite sex. When you watch one of these misguided souls struggling under an overloaded barbell, lurching and bouncing, form all shot to hell, you realize it’s no mystery why the chiropractic business is flourishing.

That type of training at best develops only the muscles you can see when you face the mirror. It completely ignores the largest muscle group of the upper body—the back—which is also probably the hardest body part to learn to train properly, for two reasons: It’s the most structurally complex upper-body muscle group, and you can’t see it while you train.

But if you want a physique that’s well-balanced and symmetrical, you must train the back consistently and with impeccably executed reps. The best way to perfect your form is to make a temporary switch to an all-cable back workout.

“Cable exercises are an excellent way to learn to feel each rep,” says ace-certified trainer Steve Lischin. “You can feel the eccentric stretching or negative portion on a cable much more than with free weights. You’re still going to get the contraction at the peak of the movement like you would with free-weight exercises such as pull-ups and T-bar rows, but you get the added benefit of constant tension.”

 

With free weights, Lischin cautions, momentum can take over. “If you don’t control the negative part of the movement, then you’re losing 50 percent of the benefit of the entire movement.”

 

To apply these principles to your cable workout, Scott Wells, an NFPT-certified trainer, suggests reducing your pound-age at the beginning of this program. “Whatever weight you’re using now, drop it to half and work back up. Once you learn how to feel the contraction and stretch of each rep, that means your muscles are doing the work. You’ll be able to surpass what you were doing before in terms of results and the actual weight you can move. Making improvements is not about weight, it’s about intensity.”

Lischin says that rep speed may also be the problem. “Swinging the weight isn’t the best way to do any exercise. The constant, controlled movement is ultimately of much more benefit without the risk.” Worry less about the number of reps and more about how you perform each rep. If you tire and your form starts to suffer, you’ve reached failure for that set.

To help you learn how to feel the rep, we’ve designed two separate cable workouts. In both, you perform a close-grip and wide-grip exercise as your two mass-building movements. The former targets the muscles of your mid-back, such as your rhomboids and lower trapezius; the latter emphasizes the lats. The third exercise substitutes a cable movement for such free-weight exercises as dumbbell rows and T-bar rows. The fourth exercise is a finishing movement, used to isolate and define the harder-to-reach back muscles.