Your arms can look solid from the side and still look narrow and flat from the front. The inner half of your bicep is what fills that gap.
Search for a fix and you get the same rule everywhere: use a wide grip to hit the short head. Nobody has ever tested it. Not one study.
You have probably done seated leg raises hoping to carve out your abs. Odds are you mostly trained your hip flexors instead.
Seated leg raises are simple: sit down, keep your legs straight, and lift them, whether on the floor, a bench, or a chair.
Most of us only notice the erector spinae when the lower back feels tight, tired, or fried. Then we stretch it and hope. Usually the fix is strength work, not more stretching.
The best erector spinae exercises train the columns of muscle running either side of your spine, from your hips up to the base of your skull. Build them and you get a thicker, more resilient lower back and a bigger deadlift.
High lat insertions leave a visible gap under your armpit and give a cleaner, classic taper.
Low lat insertions wrap down toward your waist for a wider, more dramatic spread.
Which one you have comes down to genetics, and the difference between high vs low lat insertions is easy to read in about 30 seconds with a mirror.
Yes, the deadlift belongs at the front of back day, and it earns that top slot as the heaviest, most demanding pull you will do all week.
A smart back and deadlift workout wraps that anchor lift with the pulls and rows that build width, thickness, and healthy shoulders.
Your biceps might look fine from the side but flat and narrow from the front. That gap usually comes down to one muscle hiding underneath: the brachialis.
Grow it, and it physically pushes your biceps up and out, so your whole arm looks thicker.
Your front delts already work on nearly every push. Every bench press, every dip, every push-up. So if they are not growing, the problem is rarely too little work.
The fix is doing the right moves with the right form.
This guide covers the 11 best front delt exercises, tagged by equipment so you can train at home or in the gym.
The sumo squat is a wide-stance squat that hammers the one area a regular squat mostly skips: your inner thighs. You still get glutes and quads, but the turned-out stance is what makes it special.
Best part? You need zero equipment. It works at home or the gym, and the tall, upright torso is often easier on your knees and lower back.
A regular crunch only folds you from the top. The star crunch, also called the starfish crunch, makes your abs work top, bottom, and sideways in a single rep.
You lie flat in a wide X, then crunch one hand and the opposite foot up to meet over your belly.
You blamed the roads. Then the heat, your shoes, maybe your age. Anything but the couple of minutes of hip work you kept skipping before every run.
The myrtl routine is a roughly 10-minute, no-equipment set of hip mobility exercises for runners, built by coach Jay Johnson to wake up cranky hips and smooth out that stiff first mile.