How To Build A Big Back

Regular, 30+, non geared guys with a life, do not have the time and recuperability to make it worthwhile to target each little muscle in the foot and hand directly.

Between benching, overhead pressing, chins, rotator work and “Croc rows” (along with any other form of rows), the deltoids get all the stimulation they can recover from for most people. You may well be sufficiently above norm that you meaningfully benefit from even more work for your rear delts, but most people who start down that path, either over train to stagnation, or end up flappig bac and forth between exercises like a spastic, without ever getting stronger on any particular one.

As for arms, benching, dips and overhead presses (fairly narrow grip is healthier and give greater range of motion for shoulders) will get most people all the tricep stimulus they can recover from. Throw in a set of curls for those cycles where you do your chins with a pronated grip, and you should be home free as far s arms go.

If you do want to focus on arms for a cycle, by all means do more. Poliquins various “arm cures” are great, but remember that during these cycles, you will necessarily reduce the work on other body parts. Poliquin creates programs for the world’s top athletes and body builders. Not for me and most people. Again, you might be different. Ditto for cycles focusing on shoulders, or chest, or legs, or back, or whatever.

But during “regular” training, which is what most non advanced lifters should be doing all the time, when you focus on training in a “balanced” manner, boatloads of direct training for every conceivable bodypart is literally counterproductive for people that are not simultaneously genetic freaks, on gear and under medical supervision.

It might not sell magazines, gym memberships or private training sessions, but doing a few basic, compound lifts that hit the whole body; slowly increasing the loading used for each, is where it is at for most people that want to get bigger and stronger. Not in cooking up weird new angles to hit obscure muscles from.

I don’t disagree with you in principle. As every Olympia since at least Ahnold has demonstrated, adding isolation exercises can give benefits beyond what is achievable with compounds alone. Especially for advanced lifters, who are at the less remunerative end of the diminishing returns curve in the compound lifts.

I also agree in the specific case you allude to; a trainee who has spent his life benching, and little else, with a huge discrepancy between how close he is to potential in his front vs rear delts. In that case, piling on rear delt work, while sticking to maintenance for the front, is probably the best course until some semblance of balance is restored.

For most people far from their potential, though, I seriously doubt adding a set of facepulls will make all that difference one way or the other; assuming they work their basics hard. And, facepulls require access to a pulley stack; which makes it less garage gym friendly. Which means, for most people, they will have to schlep it to a gym and stand in line. Which, again for most people, probably result in more damage from missed days, than whatever benefits said facepulls could possibly do anyway.

My experience with flies of any kind, is that they are way too likely to result in rotator problems, compared to the “benefits” they bring. Again, amongst regular trainees. And have you ever seem anyone benefit from non weighted band work, outside of elite level lifters doing explosive drills? I haven’t, but I haven’t seen every trainee under the sun. Just enough of them who use switching up their program from kettlebells to sledge hammers to sandbags to bands to chains to machines to freeweights to plyometrics to calisthenics to HIT to volume training to crossfit to cockswings as an excuse for not making progress on the basics, that I tend to take most of it with a big grain of salt. After all, dudes in prison, with access to nothing more than a rusty old bench and a barbell (and a healthy heaping of motivation derived from not wanting to be somebody’s bitch), tedn to progress much better than pretty much any program fad enthusiast I have ever run into. Again, elite level geared monsters excepted.

BTW, All this ranting is derived from training “regular Joes.” The kind who is liable to believe anyone pasing himself off as a “personal trainier”, whether that person recommends Crossfit, Starting Strength, or doing blindfolded cockswings on a yoga ball, for getting fit. THE biggest obstacle these guys face as pertains to making progress, is simply that they flap around too much, obsessing over too many, constantly shifting, miracle exercises they simply ‘have’ to do; conveniently all of whom are not particularly systemically taxing.

If you know what you are doing, and you sound like you do; and have actually witnessed adding direct rear delt work to a sound basic routine benefiting you, who the heck am I to tell you you are wrong? The guys I have helped training, are more likely to look like reasonably healthy computer programmers, finance guys and middle aged militia movement aficionados (probably because that is what they are, duh :) ), than like Poliquin trainees, Olympia contenders or MMA champions.