The Perfect V-Taper

Of course that singular muscle group to revolutionize the look of your entire upper body is nothing other than the lats. Just like leg squats can get your entire legs bulked up, so can lats squats bulk up your shoulders, back, wings, arms and chest, all of them, simultaneously. So what are these lats squats? Unfortunately, they are not a singular exercise like that of the leg squats. Lats squats are a group of exercises that invoke the same kind of build-up and endurance in your lats muscles, as leg squats do to all of your leg muscles.

You can start with the most common of upper-body exercises, the chin-ups. What's different about chin-ups though, in working out your lats, is to make sure that you use the monkey grip on the stationery bar. This implies that instead of having the regular finger grip on the stationery bar, where the thumb is gripping below, while the remaining fingers are gripping above, your monkey grip causes all of the five fingers to be gripping the bar from above.

Thumb support from below, implies support from chest muscles. Thumb support from above, coupled with the fact that all the remaining fingers, are already gripping from above implies that all the pressure, is now exerted by your lats alone, in pulling up your body above the bar. This is a very effective work out for your lats. Pull-ups must always be the very first set of excercises that you do during your upper body workouts. In fact they can be used as the first and last set of exercises in every upper body work out regimen, to signify its effect in warm ups and cool downs.

If you intend to perform front or back pull ups as part of your regular upper body work out, in addition to using it during warm ups and cool downs, then add weights during your pull ups, and put your muscles to test. It is however, a recommended best practice to add weights during pull-ups, if and only if you are capable of performing more than 12 reps of front and back pull-ups without weights during your warm ups and cool downs.

If you are working out in a gym, you can always use the pull down machine to do lats pull downs. Again using your monkey grips here will help you work out your lats. Grips with arms wide apart will build your shoulders outwards. Grips with arms close to each other will bulk up your rhomboids. Pull downs can be loaded with weights so that the weights weigh much more than your own body weights. Doing pull downs with your gripping arms close together will not grow your shoulders outwards, but will make the shoulder muscles thicker.

To make sure that you achieve bulky rhomboids, thick shoulder muscles, as well as outward growing shoulder muscles, do as many reps with arms gripping close to each other, as you do with arms gripping wide apart from each other. Alternatively make sure that the number of sets for pull downs with arms gripping wide apart are more, say 4 to 5 sets, than the number of sets with arms gripping close together, say 2 to 3 sets. Pull downs are one of those few upper body exercises, for which machines are most suitable, as compared to all other upper body exercises, in which free weights are more superior on any given day.