Wide Grip Pullups / Lat Width?

Bigger Stronger Leaner Powerlifting & Strength Sports
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[quote]Hennes wrote:
Using a wide grip leads to a shorter range of motion of the lats. Anyway, I prefer to do pullups on rings. More stabilizing muscles are involved and you can easily change your hand position, even during the exercise.[/quote]

I’m not sure what you mean by ROM for the lats being shorter. The wider your hands on a pullup the less elbow flexion is involved, thus activating the muscles in the back more. Because you take the biceps out the movement more, the lats are required to take over more of the work. Did I say the word “more” enough?
One more time; more.

And I always feel wide grip pullups more in the lats than anywhere else. Although I’m sure that if a person focuses on pulling with their arms rather than lats, they might feel it there more. It’s probably a matter of technique.

-MAtt

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Of course youre right about the arms involvement. But the lats` function is to pull down and turn the upper arm to the back. The maximum contraction position is with your arms close to your torso and a supinated grip. The fully stretched position is with your arms extended above your head.

Since a wider grip leads to a smaller radian of the exercise it works the lats with a smaller ROM. In other words: In the bottom position you dont achieve a full stretch and in the top position you dont reach a full contraction. Check an anatomy book.

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Excercise ROM:
Your lats pull on your upper arm, the humerus. If you have a shoulder-width grip, during a pull-up, your upper arm travels from pointing roughly straight up, to pointing roughly straight down, a full 180 deg.

Whereas if you have a wide grip, your upper arm is not pointing straight up in the hang phase, its probably somewhere more around 30 deg short of vertical, so your upper arm is traveling only about 150 deg to point straight down at the top of the lift.

So wide grip does not have the same range of motion for your lats as shoulder width. However, it does decrease the leverage of the biceps and the lats, so you are making the lats work harder. Another thing it does is force you to keep your elbows out to the side more during the pull-up, instead of coming in front of you. Those things combine to make a BW pull-up harder on the lats. Of course you could instead do a regular shoulder-width pull-up and just add mroe weight instead.

Essentially, using a wide grip pull-up to target your lats is sort of like using a quarter squat to target your quads: you’re able to load up more on the weight the muscle is lifting and the muscle is working a lot harder, but through a decreased range of motion.

Rotator cuff health and ROM:
Think of your rotator cuff like a cup around the top of the humerus, facing forward and slightly down. If you raise the arm to far above the head or out to the side, your upper arm is reaching the edges of the cup. The way your body allows more range of motion is by pulling the shoulder blade down and in, sort of opening the rotator cuff up and out, to allow for your arm to travel further up and back.

So wide grip and BTN pull-ups just require you to pull your shoulder blades in and down to open up the rotator cuff “cup” and allow your arm to go out wider. I think they both give you a bit of work in the upper middle of your back because your Rhomboids probably are working to pull your shoulder blades in and open up your rotator cuff for more upper arm ROM.

While this extreme stretching of the rotator cuff is probably fine for people with a healthy cuff, it might cause problems if you’ve got any rotator cuff issues.