Your Guide to Bigger Back & Delts
Jay Cutler Shows You How
With nearly 25 years of in-the-trenches training experience and four Mr. Olympia titles Jay Cutler has a treasure trove of bodybuilding knowledge. Here he outlines his thoughts on back and lat training and reveals a routine for each that served him well in the past.
JAY ON BACK
Pull-ups
The champ was quite humbled at how badly he sucked at pull-ups when he first tried doing them again after a long break. “It’s not so much a strength issue, because I can pull a ton of weight on a lat pulldown any time,” he clarifies. “But with chins, or pull-ups, there’s a technique to it that requires a bit of a learning curve and a good deal of practice before you get it down. I do them at every back workout now.”
Over the course of 4 sets, he typically gets 6 reps on his own and has a spotter help him just enough to reach his goal rep range of 9-10.
Because they are so demanding, pull-ups have to be done first in the workout. Once his obligation of 4 sets on the pull-up bar has been fulfilled, Jay moves on to the lat pulldown station. Cutler believes variety and hitting the lats from every possible angle is critical for making continual gains over the years, so his choice of bar attachments and grips is constantly shifting from workout to workout. The standard wide overhand grip targets the upper and outer lats, while flipping his hands to a reverse grip on the same bar will better recruit the lats further on down.
Barbell Rows
Jay does plenty of T-bar rows and dumbbell rows, but barbell rows are definitely his weapon of choice for thickening up his lats. They are a staple in almost every workout, and he likes to alternate the standard overhand grip with an underhand grip from week to week. “Just like with lat pulldowns, I feel it lower in my lats with a reverse grip,” he notes.
“Back is one muscle group where too many guys get all hung up on how much weight they use,” he tells us. “They think because Dorian rowed over 400 and Ronnie was doing 500 in his video, that’s what they should use to get a huge back. But 99 times out of 100, these guys are just yanking the weight up and letting it drop, and getting almost no stimulation in the lats at all. They would be so much better off forgetting about how many stupid plates are on the bar and focusing on what they feel in their backs during the set.”
Jay is known to be a volume trainer, so a back workout never goes by with just one type of row. “I like the Hammer seated row machines because your torso is stabilized and you can focus on squeezing,” he says. Jay uses supported machine rows like this to focus on middle back thickness, a quality that like shoulder and back width, a champion bodybuilder can never have too much of.
“The torso needs to stay upright at all times,” Jay points out. “When guys go too heavy, they start leaning forward to start the pull and then leaning back way too much to finish the rep. They wind up shortening the range of motion when they think they are increasing it, and using more heave and momentum than actual back power to move the weight.” In other words, ditch the ego, move the pin up a few holes in the stack, and do the damn cable rows correctly if you want results.
Machine Pulldowns
Jay doesn’t do machine pulldowns too often, but they do make an appearance in his back routine now and then. “Sometimes I do them just as a general warm-up, lighter and with higher reps, or else I might do them at the very end to get that last pump in my back.”
JAY ON SHOULDERS
Any of you who have stood next to Jay know that even the best photos and videos don’t do justice to how massive, wide, and round his shoulder span is. Live and in person, they truly are unreal to behold. Back in Jay’s early days as a teenage competitor, all he really had going for him aside from a mongo frame were his big sweeping quads and those sick shoulders. Since then, Jay has capitalized on a genetic gift by smashing the shit out of his shoulders with plenty of heavy, raw iron. They are now easily among the best pair of delts ever built by a human being.
Overhead Presses
You will occasionally find Jay on a machine for presses, but most often he likes to do seated dumbbell presses. And he’s a strong mofo on those, too. He’s been captured on video many times pushing up 140s and even 150s in good form, doing the reps all on his own, for sets of 8-10. “It’s tough getting away from dumbbell presses because they just feel right, and they’ve always been super effective for me,” Jay confides. For a period he did standing military presses as his mainstay pressing movement. “Those were great for the entire shoulder complex, plus it helped thicken my upper back.”
Jay’s style of performing lateral raises might raise an eyebrow among the Form Nazis out there (who I feel the need to mention often have very little muscle mass to show for their perfect form in the gym), but it’s what works best for his particular structure. “You never know what someone is feeling when they do an exercise a certain way, which is why it’s ignorant to judge another person’s form— especially if it’s obviously working well for them.”
One look at the bulging, round caps of Jay’s shoulders should be indication enough that the form he has adapted, which involves leading with the elbows rather than the wrists, is exactly the way he needs to do the movement. It might look like a hybrid between a lateral raise and an upright row, but it’s clearly been getting the job done for Cutler’s crazy side delts.
“If you’re trying to build the best physique possible, you can’t neglect body parts,” he pronounces. “Of course the front delts get hit on presses, but to maximize the quality, detail, and separation in them, you have to train them.”
Jay prefers barbell front raises, and makes sure his anterior delts are in fact taking the brunt of the stress. “Don’t let your traps get involved, as they will on any lateral movement if you’re not careful,” he advises. “Try to think of your hands as hooks and the your arms as a way to transfer the resistance on to the front delts.”
Rear Delt Machine
Rarely do you ever hear a bodybuilder express a desire to build huge rear delts, but Jay professes that extreme development in the posterior heads is a little-known secret to stupefying width. “Whenever you’re seen from the side in the quarter-turns or the side chest or triceps poses, that extra development in the rear delts adds a whole other level of impressiveness to the shoulders that most bodybuilders are too blind to realize,” he says.
Mr. O often does two dedicated exercises for this underrated muscle group, selecting from the rear delt machine shown here, dumbbell rear laterals facedown on an incline bench, or the two-arm cable version that looks like the reverse motion of a cable crossover.
For this somewhat unique movement, Jay stands a few steps away and faces an overhead cable and weight stack. He pulls a rope attached to that cable to just under his pecs. It’s a finishing movement, which Cutler says brings out inner-back density and details. “It’s for the rear delts, but you also get the rhomboids and middle traps, the areas that you want to pop with detail in a rear double biceps shot."
Shrugs
Jay trains his traps with shoulders, not necessarily because he feels they have to be, but more due to the fact that his back workout is long and demanding enough without tacking traps on at the tail end. With shrugs, Jay rotates between using a barbell, dumbbells (he’s gone as heavy as 220s), or a Hammer Strength machine. “I tend to do the dumbbells or machine more because of the neutral hand position with the palms rotated in toward the torso,” says Jay. “I find I get a slightly better range of motion and feel a deeper contraction that way.”
Day 1: Chest and calves
Day 2: Back and traps
Day 3: Shoulders and arms
Day 4: Legs
*Rest days are taken as needed. Sometimes Jay will run through all four days before taking a rest day.
Jay’s Back Workout, Circa 1992— Age 18
Lat Pulldowns to Front 4 x 10
Pulldowns Behind Neck 4 x 10
Close-grip Pulldowns 4 x 10
Seated Cable Rows 4 x 10
One-arm Dumbbell Rows 4 x 10
Barbell Rows 4 x 10
T-bar Rows 4 x 10
Hyperextensions 4 x 10
Jay’s Olympia Back Workout
Lat Pulldowns (standard or reverse-grip) 3-4 x 8-10
Deadlifts* 4 x 8-10
One-arm Dumbbell Rows 3 x 8-10
Barbell Rows** 3 x 8-10
T-bar Rows 3 x 8-10
Seated Cable Rows 4 x 8-10
Hyperextensions 4 x 8-10
Standing Cable Pullovers using rope (FST-7 “Sevens”) 7 x 8-10
*Done at every other back workout.
**Alternates overhand and underhand from workout to workout.
Jay’s Shoulder Workout, Circa 1992— Age 18
Seated Behind-neck Barbell Press 4 x 10
Dumbbell Lateral Raises 4 x 10
Barbell Front Raises 4 x 10
Shrugs Behind Back 4 x 10
Jay’s Olympia Shoulder Workout
Seated Dumbbell or Machine Press 4 x 6-10
Dumbbell Lateral Raises 4 x 10
Front Barbell or Dumbbell Raises 4 x 10
Bent Dumbbell Rear Laterals 4 x 10
High Pulley Rows or Cable Rear Laterals 4 x 10
Seated Machine Laterals (FST-7 “Sevens”) 7 x 10
Shrugs (dumbbell, barbell, or machine) 5 x 12
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