Your Lats are Core Muscles

There are two very popular gym exercises that targets the lats. There's the lat pull-down, in which you sit with your legs braced under a padded bar, and the seated row, in which you sit with your feet up on supports in front of you. What happens when you sit? You cut your body in half. You certainly use the lats to pull a bar toward your body. But by sitting on your butt you prevent that co-contraction with the glutes that provides stability for your lower back.

The lat pull-down and seated row share one other characteristic: They're typically done with god-awful form. People new to working out with weights will hunch their shoulders on the seated row, which prevents the targeted upper-back muscles from doing much of anything, while the more experienced hardcore muscle builders will do a limbo-like move on the lat pull-down, leaning so far back that they're using everything but their lats to move the weight. (and jerking like crazy)

Here is the new rule for working your lats: Do the movement in a position that will allow the lats to act as both a prime mover and a core stabilizer such as standing, prone, hanging from a chin-up bar. Instead of sitting kneel or stand, which will force you to stabilize your core while working your lats and the other upper-back muscles (the new rules of lifting supercharged)

This is some good stuff.... so let's change the way we work out lats... it's a core muscle because it's attached to the tailbone all the way around the erector spinae, the columns of muscle on either side of your spine down to the glutes. So, when you're working your lats, look at it as a core workout.

And that's today's 411 on Health and Fitness.

Lisa D.