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Most back workouts you find online are lat-focused, and if your back is already wide, following them is shooting yourself in the foot.

Here's what a typical "back day" looks like: lat pulldowns, cable rows, straight-arm pulldowns, pull-ups. It sounds balanced because the exercises are different. But every single one of them targets the same muscle — the lats — this means redundancy, junk volume, but it also means building width session after session with no counterbalance.

The result? You train consistently, you get stronger, and your back gets wider. Not because you're doing too much, because you're doing the wrong things for your specific goal.

There are two other reasons this happens that have nothing to do with your workout: poor movement execution, and bad exercise selection and ordering.

Poor movement execution

Even if your exercise selection is perfect, bad technique will route the work to the wrong muscles. Three things to watch:

Shoulder retraction/protraction, elbow placement, and momentum.

Exercise selection and order

What you put first in a session is what you're prioritising. If you open every back day with a lat pulldown, you're telling your body that lats are the priority, and you'll train them fresh, heavy, and consistently. Everything that follows gets your leftover energy.

If your goal is definition over width, your session should open with the muscles that create that: rhomboids, rear deltoids, mid and lower traps. Those are the muscles that build the sculpted, structured look between the shoulder blades. The lats can be secondary, or removed from the equation for a period entirely.

Examples of exercises you can include in your routine for more depth: 

• T-Bar rows - Upper Back
• Smith Machine rows - Upper Back
  
• Wide grip rows in general - Upper Back
• Reverse Flys - Rear Delts
• Hyperextensions - Lower Back

It's Not Just Your Back

Fixing the triangle starts with realizing the back is only one piece of the puzzle. Two other areas will make or break your silhouette:

Lower body development: If your upper body is wide and your lower body isn't developed to match, the triangle shape gets worse. The goal is to build width where it creates balance. That means targeting the outer quad for that sweep that widens the leg from the front, the glute medius and glute minimus for some volume on the side of your glutes. These are the muscles that create the hourglass proportion from the lower half. Most people skip them entirely or bury them under squats and hip thrusts that don't isolate them.

Shoulders: If your upper traps are overdeveloped, they will visually eat your shoulders. The trap muscle runs from the base of your skull down to your mid-back, and when it's thick at the top, it fills the space between your neck and your shoulder joint, making your shoulders look lower, narrower, and less defined than they actually are. You can have solid deltoids underneath and they'll still disappear behind the trap mass. This is why a real shoulder routine matters just as much as fixing your back.

One overdeveloped area affects everything else, so everything else should also be worked on to fix the back.

The full Fix Your Back program covers ALL of this in detail. For 8 weeks, 4 training days per week, with mic'd up video demos for every back exercise so you know exactly how to execute each movement. If this post resonated but you're still lost, my program will guide you through this journey where your back will soon become unrecognizable. We work on lower body width and upper body depth, we work on your shoulders, while deprioritizing upper body width. 

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