Many a people have asked me which muscle the pullover works best and I have asked them to try out that exercise with a very light weight for about 25 repetitions.  This pumps in a lot of blood to the concerned muscle and you will be able to identify which muscle it works very well.  But then, if done wrong, this exercise hits the triceps more and you may not be able get the best out of it.  The exercise I am referring to is in fact, a straight arm pull over done standing, instead of lying down on a bench.  This exercise is often not done or not put to good use in the gym, as straight arm or bent arm pull over is done in its stead.  But the shadow of shoulder injury always looms large over your head while you do a heavy pullover but the lat press down or the straight arm lat pull down simply works the lats, without any chance of the shoulders ever getting injured. 

There are two groups of muscles that you exercise in a gym; ones that stay tightly pumped up for a long time and the ones that hardly feel pumped up.  Your forearms and biceps swell up with blood during a good workout, leaving you feeling great, but your thighs and latissimus dorsi can feel so weak for a day or two after an intense session, but still may not give you that pumped up feeling.  I do not know why this is so, but sometimes, after doing a few sets of barbell rowing, you still may not be very sure if it was your lats that took all the beating. 

The workout for your latissimus dorsi is therefore a little tricky, because a few sets of chin ups or lat pull downs or barbell rows can make your biceps, forearms and traps very tired and leave you wondering whether your lats did any workout at all.  These small supporting muscles often become the obstacles to a heavy lats workout.  Almost every workout for the lats involves the biceps and they often get tired first before the main muscle group does. 

To beat this anomaly in lat workouts, I once tied my elbows to the bar and tried pressing the bar down, on a lat pull down machine. I tried this way out because the upper arm moved along at an almost 180 degree arc with a brutal force and lower arm did not seem to be doing much except hold on tightly to the bar.  The lats sure did feel good, but I still felt some part of the muscle had to be stressed a little more.  This is where super setting did its best.    I did a set of lat press downs as it is called, and followed it up with a set of chin ups and lo! got the best ever pump for the lats.  Of course, lat press down hit my triceps too, but only a little bit, which happens sometimes in a heavy straight arm pullover workout too.

How to do the Lat Press Down

1.    I suggest you try a different kind of warm up as a prelude to your lat workout.  After you warm up the whole body for the day’s session, you do a few sets of lat pull downs too, albeit in a slightly different way.  Instead of doing 2-3 sets of high rep warm up exercise on the lat pull down, you do about five sets of lat pull downs for just six reps per set, with a weight that you can easily do for 15 reps.  Do not take any more than 30 seconds between these warm up sets.  I have seen that 2-3 sets of high rep warm exercise almost deplete your energy for the heavy workout that is soon to follow.  But the low rep warm up sets bring about a certain high that comes from anticipation of what is to follow soon.