Excerpt from a T-nation article I’m working on right now where I cover some specialist exercises and techniques you can use to build a wider back. Based on this idea:
If you generate force when a muscle is in a stretched position then we know from research that this will overall yield a bigger hypertrophy response as compared to targeting a muscle at shorter lengths. There’s a little more to it than that, and that doesn’t mean that shortened range exercises aren’t good at building muscle (on the contrary, they are easier to recover from and can be used more frequently, which is useful from a hypertrophy programming standpoint). But, spending more time using exercises that require you generate more force at long muscle lengths will result in bigger gains in lean muscle tissue compared to exercises that don’t load a muscle as well when fully stretched.