Bigger Lats With Barbell Pullovers At Home

How about an exercise that focuses on your lats, but trains the upper back, chest, shoulders and triceps along with them? Here is to the great barbell pullovers!

Barbell Pullovers At Home

You normally see them done on benches, but many of us training at home don’t have one available. Is that a problem? No, if you use good form, the slightly smaller range of motion when doing barbell pullovers on the floor is not very important:

But I Don’t Have A Barbell!

What if you don’t have a barbell? With dumbbells you can still do pullovers. ExRx says those are more chest-centric, but in my opinion the difference between using a barbell and a dumbbell is very small – in both cases a lot of work comes from the latissimi.

On that note, ExRx also lists both pullover varieties as isolations and again I disagree. An exercise with one target muscle and seven synergists is a compound.

If You Have Both

If you own both, a barbell and dumbbells, there is still some advantage to be had from switching between them when doing pullovers. Because the position of the muscles is not entirely the same and even small differences in mechanics can coax your muscles into more growth.