Lat pulldown: which grip builds a wide back?

Which muscle gives you a wide back?

Your “wide back” is mostly the latissimus dorsi: Latin for the widest of the back. It starts from the vertebrae of your mid and lower back, the top of your pelvis and your lowest ribs, runs under your armpit and inserts deep in a groove at the front of your upper arm bone, through a tendon that twists (Bhatt et al., 2013; Omar et al., 2010).

So it’s a back muscle that pulls on your arm. The middle of your back, between your shoulder blades, belongs to the traps and the rhomboids.

What do the lats do?

Like any muscle, it pulls its two attachments together: it pulls your arm toward your pelvis. Arms raised, it stretches; elbows brought down to your hips, it shortens.

It makes two movements. When your elbows come down at your sides, as on the pulldown, that’s shoulder adduction. When they come back from in front of you, as on a row, that’s shoulder extension.

Wide or narrow grip on the lat pulldown?

Your hand is just the end of the lever: what your lats follow is the path of your elbow. In 15 men on an overhand lat pulldown, hands at 1, 1.5 and 2 times shoulder width, the 6-rep max was 80.3, 80.0 and 77.3 kg (about 177, 176 and 170 lb). Over the whole lift, the lats were just as active at all three widths; in the lowering phase only, as the bar goes back up, slightly more with the wide grip (Andersen et al., 2014). That’s measured muscle activity, not growth.

Your hand still matters a little: in 12 men at 70% of their max, palms forward (overhand) activated the lats more than palms facing you (underhand), wide or narrow (Lusk et al., 2010).

A review of 23 studies also favors pulling the bar in front of your head rather than behind your neck (Di Fonza et al., 2026).

Rows, pull-ups, pullovers: which settings?

On the seated row, a narrower grip and elbows closer to your body work the lats harder (two settings tested separately). On pull-ups, grips come out about even. And the pullover, often sold as a back exercise, mostly works the pecs (Di Fonza et al., 2026).

Feel it mostly in your arms on the pulldown?

In 8 beginner women, a simple technique cue was enough to make their lats work harder (Snyder and Leech, 2009). And they respond to training: in 18 young untrained men, 8 weeks of lifting, pulldowns and rows included, thickened the fibers sampled from their lats, whose force grew in step (+22%) (Paoli et al., 2016).