🔥 LAT PULL DOWN BAR PATH AND GRIP 👇

The bar path for lat pulldowns can influence how much the lats are used. Often the bar is pulled way too back or stopped short of its full ROM. The truth is you shouldn’t be following the path of the bar but the path of your elbows. Since the lat attaches to the humerus your elbow is the easiest reference point of its movement. And the goal of an exercise is to bring the target muscles insertion closest to its origin. That path is shown in the middle picture above at point 1 and 2, as you can see the lat attaches a little anteriorly (forward) on the humerus hence why it is an internal rotator. Because of its insertion we will have some slight internal rotation throughout the movement.

The easiest way to think of doing the lat pulldown is pulling your elbows the back side of your hip bone not passed that. The problem with pulling to far back or to high is the lats line of pull changes and cannot apply a force to help move the weight. This is when we can start to use the posterior deltoid too much or teres major. The same thing can be applied to pull ups, and rowing exercises.

As far as the grip, it is well thought that wide grip targets the outside of the lats, and it is true to an extend the outer fibers do fire up more. However it can decrease progress because of the increased moment arm. This simply means because of how far your grip is, the lat must do more work to lift the same amount of weight. Therefore it’s a lot harder to do wide grip lad pulldowns then standard. The benefit will probably be negligible.