The BEST Dumbbell Back Exercises (WIDTH & THICKNESS)

So, you want to build a big back and all you have at your disposal is some dumbbells? Well, I've got good news. I can help you by giving you the right exercises. And the thing is, you're probably used to using either machines or barbells to get the job done, but it doesn't have to be that way if you are doing the right things. That said, there is some context needed here, too, because not everybody is focused on size. Some just want to be stronger. Some want maybe even a more durable back. As a physical therapist, I've got you covered no matter what your goal is, but again, it starts with the right exercises. And right here, it starts with the first category, and that's strength. So what if you did just want to get strong? What dumbbell exercise are you doing for your back that's going to get you there? Well, I don't mean to get cute here and introduce a new piece of equipment, but honestly, you can't pass up this exercise option, and it's simply a weighted pull-up. So go grab a pull-up bar from a sporting goods store for 15 bucks or 20 bucks, but take that dumbbell and either grab hold of it with your feet like this, or simply wrap a dog leash around it and turn it into a weight belt or dip belt and wrap it around your hips. Far too often people focus on just increasing their repetitions here, and while that is a good way to increase some overall strength, it's not the best way to overload strength as the main focus. So if you do this with a dumbbell here, you've solved that problem, and it's a great one even if you had available to you those barbells or even those machines. Next up, we have power. Now this is where we want to take that weight that we're moving, but add that other element of speed. How quickly can you move that weight through space? And when we train athletes, that is a very important element of our training. So what do we do? Well, you want to do either one of two exercises here. The first one is what I call a Dumbbell Dead Row, and all we're doing is basically turning this into a deadlift row combination. It's a very explosive, dare I say, fun exercise that definitely includes that speed that's missing from a traditional barbell row. Now some of our athletes actually have to be more explosive unilaterally. So we have an option for that. It's called the Gorilla Row. And similar to the Dead Row, it's an exercise we can be very explosive on, but one side at a time. Now you'll notice there's a little less leg involvement here, but by no means does that take away the explosive power that you're building here with your back. What's nice about this is you have two variations. You can either allow the elbow to drift further out to the side away from you to get more of the upper back and rear delts, or you can keep it nice and tight to get more explosive for the lats. The bottom line is that either of these ground-based exercises checks that box for helping you to become more powerful. And if that is your goal, then these are the two exercises that I recommend every time. Now if you're like most who come to YouTube fitness videos, you probably are looking for the exercise that helps you just to build the big back, right? A big V taper wider back. Well there is an exercise to do that. It's called the Dumbbell Tripod Row. It's named that way because of the three points of contact with one hand on the back of a bench for support and two feet sprawling on the floor. Now this should not be confused with a Dumbbell One Arm Row, even though it is actually similar in terms of the focus, the execution is quite different. It doesn't have some of the hernia risks that come from that variation of the exercise. But what it does have is an ability to drive high levels of tension into the working muscle. And when you're trying to build big muscles, tension overload is one of the key ways to drive hypertrophy. So this exercise is tailor-made for that. With the extra support you get with your hand on the back of the bench, you're able to focus mostly on just lifting as heavy a weight as possible to get in that five, six, or seven rep range, but still be able to drive really good contractions into the lats by keeping the elbows tight to your side and driving them back behind the body. The extra stability provided in the tripod setup, again, eliminates some of those other things that we don't want, but does give you my favorite option for hypertrophy when tension overload is the method. Now let's say you're a little bit more sadistic, right? You like the burn and you want to build muscle with the burn. Well, we've talked about many times before, those higher rep counts can still really drive muscle growth if you know how to use them properly. You're going to have to train them all the way to failure, but you need an exercise that doesn't cause other areas of your body to give up first. So what do we do? It's another row variation, but it's the chest supported row. And we don't just do one variation here, but we perform a drop set so we can train two and through failure. So my favorite way to do it is to lay face down on a bench here with my dumbbell row weight. And what I start with is my elbows pointed out wide. So what I get here is more of that upper back, rear delt, and mid back thickness. I take this all the way to failure, realizing that I'm not quite done at that point because all I have to do to keep this going and to keep the burn coming is to simply drop my elbows down close to my side, shifting that focus now more to the lats. And I do once again what I did before, take it all the way to that rep grinding extreme burn failure. Because we know in that range, as the metabolites continue to accrue in your muscles, that we have the opportunity for growth. So if you're willing and able to get comfortable being uncomfortable, well then there are some muscle gains waiting for you and this is the exercise that's going to allow you to do it the easiest. Now, of course, there is one other method for driving muscle gains through hypertrophy, and that is through one that a lot of people are talking about these days. It's actually one we've been using for a long period of time here, and that is stretch and the eccentric overload of a stretch on an exercise. Well, what exercise is more tailor-made than a dumbbell pullover when it's the lats that you're trying to grow? But there's a few things you want to make sure you're doing right when you do the exercise. And the first thing is, position your body the right way. To increase the stretch on the lats, you want to move their attachments further away from each other. So we know that our arms and our hips are going to want to be separated as far as we can possibly place them. How do we do that? Start by dropping the hips. When you put your hips down in this position, you should already feel an intense stretch on the lats just by putting your arms up overhead to start the exercise. But when you drop the arms further behind your body, you're going to feel this intensify even more, and you'll know you're doing the exercise right. Last thing is tempo, and here I want you to slow down. I want you to feel every single repetition as you perform that lowering of the dumbbell. The greater the stretch that you get, the greater the stimulus for growth. If you can go a little bit lower on each subsequent repetition because your flexibility is improving from rep to rep, then by all means do it. But when you're looking for that stretch exercise that's going to give you the growth you're looking for, the dumbbell pullover is my go-to choice every time. Now sometimes as coaches we need exercises that allow us to train our athletes with a little bit more versatility, especially if we're short on time. So rather than look for a different portion of the lat with each exercise, or a different portion of the upper back, we need one that hits the total body, but has a focus of the back involved. For me, the exercise is a man-maker. What this is, is essentially a renegade row on one side that we perform with a pushup, into a renegade row on the opposite side with a pushup. From here we simply add to the total body experience by standing up and pressing the dumbbells up overhead. The benefit here is that we're not only getting our back involved in this exercise, but we're getting a pull and a push exercise combined into one. Again, giving us an opportunity to get our athlete in and out of the gym more quickly, but not have to overlook or negate an important element of their overall training plan. So remember what I mentioned in the beginning? What if you just want a healthier back? And believe me, if you have back pain, the one thing you want more than anything is a healthier back. So what's the exercise? Well, I actually have two choices because there's a lot of ground to cover on your back. Some of us have issues in our low back, and some have issues in our upper back. But both of them need to be strengthened. If I start at the upper back, this little, boring exercise sequence will pay huge dividends to getting rid of any of those knots that you feel consistently in that area. And it's called the I's, T's, Y's, and W's. And all you're doing here is basically making the shape of the letters with your arms and a little bit of weight in your hands. Because these can be done very, very lightly, and they're done with more of a corrective exercise focus. So the arms go back behind you to make the I, they go straight out to the sides to make the T, they go up more at an angle of the Y, and then your arms make the shape of a W for the last portion. Now what's happening here? Well, we're kind of creating a symphony of muscle movement throughout the sequence. Because the different movements target the different areas of the back. But I can assure you, all of them done together will hit all those small muscles that are being overlooked that lead to that chronic tightness and pain you feel right now. What if it's the lower back that's your problem? My favorite exercise here is simply something called the Reverse Hyper. And all you have to do is lay face down on a bench with your hips right at the end of the bench and your feet in contact with the floor. You grab that dumbbell and you squeeze and lift the dumbbell up. But don't do this by just squeezing with your feet and lifting with your feet. Instead focus on squeezing your glutes and then lifting the legs up. What this will do is train your glutes to be the main supporter of your low back muscles. When this happens, a lot of low back pain that you're having right now goes away because the muscles that should be performing a lot of the hip extension are actually doing their job. When that happens, you don't feel any more low back pain and this video just became the most valuable video you've ever seen for this one exercise alone. So now those corrective exercises I just showed you were good for anyone with any nagging pain or discomfort or to actually help to prepare you to have better strength gains on those big exercises. Well then this next category is sort of an on-ramp for those that maybe already have back pain but want to start to do more. Maybe all you're doing right now is this really stable machine exercises. Ultimately I want to see you in the middle of the gym floor doing exercises on your feet. So what do you do? You do a dumbbell T-bar row. What this is, you take one dumbbell with two hands on it and it sets you almost up in the perfect posture to eliminate any of those pains you might be feeling right now. It gets you in a position where you're freestanding open in the middle of the gym. Which is ultimately where you're going to want to be when you're performing your barbell rows. But what's nice about this is the dumbbell carriage point is going to be right beneath your center of gravity. Which is going to feel really good on even that cranky low back you have right now. It's a good exercise that still allows you to build muscle because you can handle a pretty decent amount of weight here. But it's not going to compromise the way you feel and ultimately it'll be a great stepping stone for getting to a better place in the end. And so my coaching colleagues and I get together and we challenge ourselves with these discussions like what are the best exercises for a particular muscle group if you're only limited to just dumbbells. Well, there's one thing we all like to do and that is just kind of keep a wild card in our back pocket. In this case, an extra. And what is that? For me when it comes to the back you've got to make sure you're also training your traps. And those exercises that I would use here are actually two. The first is just a classic dumbbell shrug and it's pretty damn simple. You're just lifting your shoulders up, trying to touch your ears and lowering them back down. And it does a really good job of effectively building those upper traps and that sort of V taper from your neck down. Except it's not really multidimensional enough. So for me, I can still train the traps, but also involve more of the upper back muscles and even a little bit of the rear delts with instead a dumbbell high pull. And if you watch the dumbbell shoulder exercises video in this series, you see that it actually made the cut for that one too. It's just a great exercise with a lot of versatility that's going to allow you to hit those upper traps. But again, be a little bit more comprehensive in the process. Speaking of the best dumbbell exercises you can do for your shoulders, you're definitely going to want to watch that video if you haven't already done that. You can watch that one here, and also you can check out the complete playlist of our dumbbell exercise series here for the best of the best, no matter what you're trying to train. If you're looking for complete programs, supplements and meal plans, you can find them over at ATHLEANX.com. In the meantime, if you haven't done so, click subscribe so you never miss any of the videos in this series or any other that we put out here, guys, I think you're going to find it really, really helpful. All right, guys. See you soon.