LBCWT coaches collaborate to give you the best guidance!

Today’s post is brought to you through the collaborative efforts of three LBC coaches: Megan, Erik and I (Nate). Let me explain.

I have a pile of research papers sitting in my office and even more stored on my computer that are just waiting to be read. You see, sometimes I come across a study and after reading the abstract I’m like ‘Oh that’s interesting’ and ‘Hey, I should read the rest of this.’ So I print them out or save them and try to get back to them when I have free moment, which admittedly is few and far between.

That being said, Coach Megan made a post about wide-grip lat pulldowns a few weeks ago. Her point was that wide-grip lat pulldowns have a shorter range of motion when compared to a medium grip. When I read her post, I remembered that I had a study comparing pronated grip positions (palms facing away from the body) for lat pulldowns. So I rummaged through my stack of research papers, found it and read it as it seemed pertinent.

In this 2014 study, the researchers basically had test subjects perform lat pulldowns using a different grip width (narrow, medium and wide) while they measured the muscle activity of the lats, traps, infraspinatus and biceps. What they found was there was similar muscle activation in all the muscles during all three grips with tendencies of the medium grip working the biceps a little bit harder than the other two. Also, there were tendencies for the wide and medium grips to work the lats more than the narrow grip. (FYI: The use of the word, “tendency“, is the researchers way of saying “We saw a difference, but it wasn`t that significant“.) So if you take into account Coach Megan`s post about the shorter range of motion during wide-grip lat pulldowns then you`re probably leaning towards using a medium grip for this exercise. Enter the Viking (Coach Erik).

Megan and I were corresponding with Erik when we got on to the topic of lat pulldowns. He made the point that when the grip is much past shoulder width it puts additional strain on the muscles of the rotator cuff. With all of the above in mind, it`s fairly obvious that you should perform lat pulldowns with a medium grip. What may not be obvious that I do want to point out is that when LBC takes you on as a client, you may only be working specifically with one coach, but you`re getting access to the collective wisdom, knowledge and experience of everyone on the LBC and Curl`s & Whey Training teams. That’s two teams working together to help you achieve the results you’re looking for – you can’t beat that!