Engaging Your Back: Evan Centopani's Workout

With one simple trick, your regular barbell workout will be safer for your lower back and harder for your back muscles. You must know!

Author: Evan Centopani

Too often I notice that people see training as something geared towards a specific muscle group. With this approach, each muscle group consists of disconnected muscles, and each of them must be worked out individually.

I once thought so myself. Over the years, my attitude to training has become more systematized and complex. Now I understand that every time we lift weights, we use the whole body, and not a single muscle. And in any intense workout, you feel this effect with your whole body.

You know what that feeling is like: you are out of breath, you are tired, you want to sit down, and you feel discomfort all over your body. Barbells and free weights induce this condition much faster than machines. This state is one of the best tools at your disposal when you want to get in shape. This is the approach I use in my back workouts.

Perhaps one of the best opportunities to "do it right" and get big dividends is in back training. With the right approach, back training becomes very energy-intensive. Here you either work up a sweat, or stop a step away from realizing your potential. The choice is yours.

For me, this is a basic, but very effective workout. It includes barbell rows, T-bar rows, lat pulldowns, and dumbbell rows. Based on the training schedule on other days of the week, I can also include a deadlift in my back workout.

On the day we filmed this video, I decided to reduce my workload. Plus, the barbell/dumbbell/T-Road combo is heavy enough already that I didn't feel like I needed to add anything else (and I did the deadlift two days ago in leg training).