Thickening the Lats | How Dennis Wolf Did It
Thickening the Lats
How Dennis Wolf Did It
BACK IN THE DAY
In the past few years maybe no other pro has been criticized more for a particular bodypart than Dennis Wolf. The bodypart being back, but in the past couple of years he has worked manfully to improve it. Before telling how he did it here’s some background to the story. (Originally published in the March 2014 edition of MD Magazine.)
It’s worth taking a little trip back in time to see where Wolf started out in the lat department. When Dennis started competing in 1999, his overall shape and lines were already very good, with the same X-frame structure we see today. That’s typically what you see with all these guys who eventually rise to the top— they start out essentially as smaller versions of what you ultimately see on the Arnold and Olympia stages.
But Dennis admits that his back was not a strong point in the beginning, either. “It was wide but still needed a lot more thickness,” he concedes. “A lot of that was because I did not know how to feel my lats when I trained them. I couldn’t even hit the front and rear lat spread poses the right way.” That’s actually a common problem. Go to any local or regional bodybuilding contest, and those are the two poses you see botched the most.
Another issue was that Dennis hadn’t done a whole lot for his back at first, so it was literally behind everything else by at least a year of hard training. “In my first year of training, I hardly did anything for my back,” he tells us. “I started bodybuilding just to see how far I could go with it and I wasn’t really training anything extra hard. My shoulders and my quads started to grow anyway because those are my most genetically gifted areas.”
As I said, Dennis took a tremendous amount of shit for not having one of the best backs in the IFBB. But he sees this as a positive thing, because if he were some lower-tier guy hardly breaking the top 10 at a smaller show, nobody would have cared enough to even notice.
“I think when you are in the position of being a top-five guy at the Olympia a few times, people pay more attention to you and they are more critical because now you are getting close to being considered the very best in the whole sport,” he says.
When people pick on a weak point, it’s usually because there is some truth to it and there is a legitimate need for the area to improve. But they also compare any body part to the guy who has the best. When Ronnie was Mr. Olympia, your back was not really good unless it was just like his— so nobody else could have a good back for eight years. These days, we hear about “back freaks” like Kai, Johnnie Jackson and Joel Stubbs, all of whom have unusually long lats that insert right at the hips.
So What Did Work for Wolf’s Back?
It would be wonderfully convenient to point out a magical exercise or workout routine that was ultimately responsible for transforming Dennis’ back from a liability to a powerful weapon in his overall visual assault of overwhelming muscle mass and shape. But it wouldn’t be accurate. It was really nothing more than the cumulative effect of improving his feel for the muscle group when he trained it, a process that took time.
“It took me years to develop a very good mind-muscle connection with my back, and once I had that I was able to try all the different exercises and stick with the ones that felt the best for me,” he says. “Just because some other guy loves a certain exercise and swears it’s perfect, that only means it’s perfect for him.”
Wolf also tried splitting the back up into two different workouts, one for width and one for thickness. He discarded that practice after only a couple of months. “You really can’t separate the exercises so easily like that,” he explains. “To say that this exercise will only make your back thicker and that exercise is only good for width is a bit silly. I went back to working the whole back at once and that’s been very good for me. It’s a big body part and you do need to hit it from a few different angles, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it all at once.”
Speaking of angles, he did find that a certain amount of volume was needed to work his back properly. “I need at least five or six different exercises on back day, for three to four sets of 12 reps each,” he notes. “A lot of times I find I’ve done six exercises already and I don’t want to stop. Back has become my favorite muscle group to train out of everything, because it’s been such a challenge for me and because I love to see how much better I can feel the contractions and get a pump than last time in the gym.” With that in mind, here are some of the exercises Dennis Wolf relies on in his back workouts to blow up his lats and assorted other smaller muscles of the upper and lower back, to create what is now one of the better backs in pro bodybuilding.
1) Reverse-Grip Lat Pulldowns
Dennis usually starts his back workout at the lat pulldown station using a straight bar with a reverse, or underhand grip. He found out several years ago that it does a better job of targeting the area he needed to improve on the most. “The wide grip you feel more in the upper back, but then when you flip your hands over you are able to reach those muscle fibers in the lower lats better.”
I’ve said this before, but Dorian Yates, who is legendary for having had one of the best backs the sport has ever seen, adamantly believed that the underhand shoulder-width grip was far superior a choice: as it allows a more complete range of motion. “For me, it was all about where I felt the exercise and how well I was able to contract my lower lats,” Wolf says. “Once I knew how productive this type of pulldown was for me, I started doing it first while I was fresh at every workout.”
Dennis also wanted to make sure we knew how critical perfect form is to him on the reverse-grip pulldowns. “I keep my torso perfectly straight, and it doesn’t move at all while I do the sets,” he said. “I pull down and squeeze the lats hard, with no rocking or leaning back. That’s how I found this works the best.”
2) Wide-Grip Lat Pulldowns
This movement has fallen into only occasional use by Dennis over the last year, only done at the very end of a workout if he feels he still hasn’t got the full-blown pump in his lats he was seeking. “Instead of the cable version, I get more out of the same grip but using an assisted pull-up machine.” When the question was posed about whether or not he ever does regular pull-ups, he had a chuckle. “You try doing those at 300 pounds sometime!” he replied.
3) T-bar Rows
Dennis does some type of free-weight row at every workout. He admits that T-bar rows are done only about every third workout, while barbell rows are more of a mainstay. He actually credits them with giving his back most of the mass we see today. Wolf also likes T-bar rows, though he considers them more of a partial movement due to the width of 45-pound plates interfering with a full contraction. “In both the barbell and the T-bar row, you always need to be careful not to stand up too much and start making it like the top part of a deadlift,” he advises. To that end, he doesn’t ever go as heavy as he could if he didn’t care about a full range of motion and quality contractions. “I lifted heavy weights with my back for years and didn’t see much improvement,” he tells us. “Once I stopped worrying about using a ton of weight and made the feeling in the muscle the most important thing, my back finally started getting better again.”
4) Hammer Strength Machine Rows
This part of the workout alternates between dumbbell and machine rows from week to week. One thing he likes about machines is the fact that his torso is fully braced and immobilized, making for a stricter rep. Dennis can also hold the contraction for a beat, something that a dumbbell isn’t as suited for. “Hammer makes a few different types of rowing machines, and I don’t always use the same one,” he points out. “They all have you pulling at slightly different angles, so you can work different parts of your back. That’s very important.” He also likes to do the machine rows one arm at a time, just as he would the dumbbell row. “Working the back with one arm at a time lets you put even more focus into what you are doing and concentrate better on the feeling inside the muscle as you pull and squeeze.”
5) Cable Rows
A final type of rowing Dennis does regularly is with a cable, and as with the machines, he infuses variety into his choices in the form of different grip attachments. Sometimes he uses the more standard close grip seen here. At other times he will use the long bar and an underhand grip as seen here, but far more often he hooks up a single D-ring and does his cable rows one arm at a time for extra concentration. At other times he sits down at a machine row and does the same thing. “I really love some of the Hammer Strength rowing machines I have tried, but we don’t have any of them in the gyms I train at in Germany,” he says with regret. “But with a cable or a machine I can do a very good job of getting a perfect pump in the lat. I am able to hold the contraction for a couple of seconds if I want to, which is a lot harder to do with free-weight rows.”
6) Shrugs
Many pros I talk to don’t put much emphasis on training their trapezius muscle anymore, and Dennis is one of them. At a certain point they simply find that their traps, which are a muscle that tends to develop fairly easy for most people in general, are just about as big as they need to be. “I do them maybe every third shoulder workout, at the very end,” Wolf says. “If someone isn’t happy with their traps, they should definitely make them more of a priority than that.”
He does have one solid tip for shrugs for those who do need to do them more often. “Come up all the way like you’re trying to touch your traps to your ears, because I see a lot of guys using the biggest dumbbells in the gym or loading all the weight a shrug machine will hold, and then just doing a little twitch rep where they barely move.”
Wolf’s Training Splits
Off-Season Training Split*
Monday: Chest and biceps
Tuesday: Legs
Wednesday: OFF
Thursday: Shoulders and triceps
Friday: OFF
Saturday: Back and traps
Sunday: OFF
*Calves are trained every other day.
Pre-Contest Training Split*
Monday: Chest
Tuesday: Quads
Wednesday: Arms
Thursday: Delts
Friday: Hamstrings
Saturday: Back
Sunday: OFF
*Calves are trained every other day, and abs are trained every day.
Typical Back Workout
Underhand Lat Pulldowns* 4 x 10-12
Pullover Machine 4 x 10-12
Assisted Pull-up Machine 4 x 10
Barbell Rows 4 x 10
Seated Cable Rows 3 x 10
Standing Low Cable Rows With Rope 3 x 10
Lat Pulldowns With Individual Handles 3 x 10
Deadlifts or Hyperextensions 3 x 10-12
*Dennis pulls to underneath his chest to target lower lats more.
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