How to Feel Your Lats

When starting out in resistance training, one of the biggest struggles that a lot of people seem to struggle with is connecting to and feeling their latissimus dorsi AKA: Lats.

The reason this may be an issue could be a combination of things like a poor mind-to-muscle connection, incorrect positioning for activation, or sometimes it can be just due them still being a small muscle because you've never worked on them before and it can sometimes be harder to squeeze and connect to a smaller, un-built muscle group.

Once you are able to establish this activation however, you'll be well on your way to making gains! Let's look at some of the best "priming" movements to establish that mind-to-muscle connection and enable yourself to feel that squeeze in your lats.

"Priming" is essentially a warm-up prior to your workout, in which you perform specific movements and light lifts to effectively prime your muscles, so you have a well established connection and a slight pump in your addressed muscle group. This will allow for a much better workout and maintains a stronger connection to the muscles during your lifts. Priming is extremely useful especially if you are having trouble connecting to a certain muscle group.

• One excellent priming movement for activating your lats is by doing a slow, controlled pull-up. Hang from the pull-up bar and allow your lats to stretch as you hang. Even if you can't yet do a pull-up, still slowly try to bring yourself up closer to the bar.. even if it's only by a few inches! Whilst doing this motion, continue to try to feel the stretch in your lats and squeeze as much as you can.

• The alternative to this, which may be easier if you are unable to successfully pull yourself up at all, is a hang. Just hang from the pull-up bar and try tensing your back muscles on and off. Keep doing this until you think you can successfully connect to your lats throughout the hang. Another variation of this is to get yourself up to the bar, however you can, then slowly release your body down whilst squeezing the back muscles.

• Another great primer for this is to stand up straight and repeatedly squeeze your shoulders back so that your scapula retracts into your back, but whilst doing these scapula retractions try and squeeze your back muscles at the same time. You should feel some activation in your lats after doing this a few times and establishing that connection to the muscle group.

If you can successfully prime your lats and at least feel them and be able to squeeze and connect to them even a little bit prior to working out your back... you should find it much easier to connect to your lats once you start your workout. As your lats get bigger and your mind-to-muscle connection grows, you'll find it will only get easier to connect to these muscles as time goes on.

Happy Lat-training!