Ultimate Pull Day Workout Guide: 5 Moves for Better Back Muscles

What is a pull day?

In the world of weight lifting and strength training, pull day means a day of the week allocated to training any muscles that help you to make pulling motions.

This mostly applies to your back and biceps but also includes the forearms and a few other parts of your posterior chain. That’s science speak for the interconnected muscles of your back body.

Let’s get to understand the ins and outs of pull day. We’ll walk you through the pull day muscle groups that you work and the benefits you can reap from pull exercises.

Finally, we’ll shine a light on a few of the best pull day moves you can do to increase your pulling strength.

What are the muscles you work on pull day?

Let’s start by examining what mechanisms are at work in your body when you pull. What muscles do you work on a pull day?

Pull day, mainly involves the muscles of your upper back, arms, and shoulders. The main muscles that you target include:

Back and Shoulders

The back is the most active part of your body when you work on a pull day. Within the upper back, you have several muscles that work in tandem to help you pull.

These are:

• Latissimus Dorsi (Lats): The lats are your biggest back muscles. They span from your lower spine, grazing your pelvis, to underneath your upper arms. When you do pulling exercises, your lats contract to bring your arms down towards your body, like in pull-ups or rows.

• Trapezius (Traps): The traps sit on your upper back and neck. These muscles help elevate and retract your shoulder blades (scapulae). They can also pull your shoulder blades downward during pulling movements, which helps you hold onto your posture and keep your shoulders stable.

• Rhomboids: The rhomboids sit in between your shoulder blades, connecting them to your spine. Your rhomboids help retract (pull inward), lift, and rotate your shoulder blades. They also help to stabilize them and keep your shoulder alignment during pull exercises.

• Rear Deltoids: The posterior deltoids (aka “rear delts”) are the back part of your shoulder muscles. Rear delts help you extend your shoulders and abduct them horizontally (move them away from your body) as you pull.

Biceps

We’re willing to bet you’ve heard of these guys, but the biceps are located on the inner part of the top of your arms. Biceps help flex your elbows and shoulders and can supinate your forearms (turn them outward) during pull moves.

Forearms

Brachialis and Brachioradialis: Don’t get their names confused! These forearm muscles help your biceps flex your elbows when you pull. They increase your grip strength and help keep your forearms stable. While the brachialis sits between your biceps and triceps, the brachioradialis connects your upper arm to your forearm.

Hitting these muscles during a pull day workout can help you get more upper body strength, better posture, and build an overall balanced physique, among other things.

Let’s walk through some more benefits of training pull days.

What are the Benefits of Pull Day Exercises?

​​Pull day exercises primarily target the muscles of the back, biceps, and rear deltoids, along with engaging various stabilizing muscles. Here are some of the key benefits of including pull day exercises in your workout routine.

Better Posture

Training pull day exercises could have you standing a little taller. Pull moves strengthen your upper back muscles, like the traps, rhomboids, and rear deltoids.

These muscles are key in helping you hold up your posture. Increasing your strength in these areas can counteract the effects of sitting or slouching for long periods of time.

If you’re like most of us, you probably work a desk job that has you seated for 8+ hours a day and not really focusing on holding your head high and spine straight.

Pull work can reduce the risk of hunched over shoulders, a crunched-up neck or an arched back— all symptoms of bad posture.

Stronger Back

Pull day exercises hit major back muscles like your latissimus dorsi (lats), which help you do exercises like rowing or rope climbing. Strengthening these muscles can help overall back strength and stability.

Back-specific exercises help you to strengthen the muscles of your posterior chain which runs along you back body. For more information, see Posterior Chain Resistance Training.

Balanced Physique

If you want an aesthetic workout that makes your back not only feel but look better, then you need to be incorporating at least one pull day into your weekly workout routine.

Including pull day exercises in your routine helps you maintain a balanced, symmetrical look to your upper body muscles. Balancing push (chest) and pull (back) exercises can prevent you from creating muscle imbalances that make one area look bigger or feel stronger compared to the other.

This may reduce your risk of injury, and improve your overall muscle-building capacity.

Grip Strength

Many pull day exercises, like pull-ups, rows, and deadlifts, require a solid grip to keep you up on a bar or holding weights or handles.

Training your grip strength during pull day workouts can translate to better performance in other exercises and activities that require grip strength, including certain sports or being able to carry heavier objects in your everyday life.

Functional Movement

When you do pull day exercises, you’re mimicking natural movement patterns, like pulling yourself up or pulling objects towards you.

These are moves we actually make in the real world. Not only in sports. Even babies need to pull their bodies up when learning to stand. There is some positive support for exercise-based interventions on functional movement capability, even for people who are untrained.

It sounds second nature, but a good capacity to pull will serve you throughout your whole life. Strengthening the muscles you use for these moves can help your functional strength and coordination. It’ll make you feel more efficient in the pull actions you practice daily.

Aesthetics

A strong and sexy back, coupled with sculpted biceps and great rear deltoids, can enhance the way your upper body looks, giving you the aesthetic of a Greek God.

These elements can help even out your proportions to create a balanced physique. Pull day exercises help you put on muscle mass, improve your shape, and define your back and arm muscles for a more appealing look.

More Calorie Burn

Many pull day moves hinge on compound exercises with intense rep volume at a fast pace. This can up your energy expenditure and metabolic rate during and after your workouts. Adding moves into your routine at a higher rep range can promote fat loss, muscle growth, or even impact your metabolic age for a healthier metabolism.

Overall, pull day exercises offer some solid benefits to your posture, back strength, grip, aesthetics, and metabolic health. They can even provide better functional movement that will impact your everyday life.

And if you’re involved in sports like rock climbing or running, training the back body muscles to pull effectively is one of the greatest assets to your athletic potential.

Make sure to get in a variety of pull day moves with your workout routine for more strength and a balanced physique. This can help you hit and push past many of the goals you’ve set for yourself in and out of the gym.

The best pull day workout plan

So now that you know the specifics of what pull day can do for you, how do we actually go about structuring a plan that will actually fit with your lifestyle and gym goals?

Here's a simple pull day workout plan with a few unique pulling exercises to try:

Single-Arm Dumbbell Row

• Set-Up: Stand with your feet hip-width apart, holding a dumbbell in one hand. Grab the side of a box or weight bench for support.

• Row: Hinge from your hips, bending your knees slightly. Row the dumbbell up towards your ribcage. Make sure your dumbbell stays tracking in line with your ribcage. Your elbow should come to about a 90-degree bend.

• Reverse: Squeeze your lats at the top, then slowly bring the weight back down so that your arm is extended in front of you.

• Reps: 4 sets X 10-12 reps per arm.

TRX Inverted Row

• Set-Up: Anchor a set of TRX suspension straps to an overhead anchor point, with the handles hanging down to an accessible point for you to hold onto. Grab them, then walk your feet forward and away from you. Keeping your body in a straight line. Your body will naturally come to a diagonal position as you walk your feet out.

• Row: Straighten your arms to hang down and away from the straps’ anchor point, widening your shoulder blades. Next, pull your chest towards the handles by squeezing your shoulder blades together.

• Reverse: Slowly lower yourself back down with control.

• Reps: 3-4 sets of 6-10 rows.

Pull-Ups

• Set-Up: Find a pull-up bar or use the top of a power tower.

• Grip: Once you find a bar, lift your arms. Twist your palms to face forward and grip your bar with your hands slightly wider than shoulder width, unless you prefer to do neutral grip pull-ups. Brace your core muscles with your arms extended.

• Lift: Driving out of your back and shoulders, bending your elbows and activating your forearms to lift your body up off the ground. Keep your chest proud. Follow through the pull movement until your chin comes up to your bar. Aim to make contact with the bar with your upper chest.

• Reverse: Slowly start to extend your elbows and lower your body back down to the starting position. Don’t drop or dump into your shoulders. If you don't control your movement here, you risk shoulder injuries on the eccentric (the “down”)  part of the move. Learn more about the ups and downs of your muscle motions: Concentric and Eccentric Muscle Contractions.

• Reps: 3 sets X 6-8 reps.

For more information on pull-ups and technique, here are some further resources:

• How to Get Better at Pull-Ups
• Neutral Grip Pull-Ups
• Power Tower Workout

Renegade Rows

• Set-Up: Start in a high plank position with a hexagonal dumbbell in each hand.

• Row: Row one dumbbell up towards your ribcage, keeping yourself stable by balancing on your other arm. Try not to tilt too far towards your arm that is holding you up.

• Reverse: Lower the dumbbell back down with control to come back to your plank, then alternate and repeat on the other side.

• Reps: 3 sets X 8-10 reps for each arm.

Face Pulls

• Set-Up: Step up to a cable pulley machine and load a light to medium weight onto your stack. You can also perform face pulls with a resistance band. Simply anchor your band to a machine or anchor point around chest height.

• Pull: Grab the handles on your cable attachment or the ends of your band with an overhand or neutral (where the palms face each other) grip. Squeeze your shoulder blades together and pull your weight directly towards your face. Make sure to keep your elbows high and send them out to the sides during this movement.

• Reverse: Resist your weight and slowly bring your arms back in front of you with control.

• Reps: 3 sets X 12-15 reps.

This is one of the best moves for your upper back. To learn more about muscular activation during face pulls, see our quick guide to this exercise: What Muscles Do Face Pulls Work.

Add these unique pull moves into your pull day workout routine to hit your different back, arm, and shoulder muscles.

They can help you build strength, stability, and more balanced muscles. If you’re struggling with any of these exercises, feel free to scale the sets and reps up or down to suit your fitness level and training goals

How many days a week should you do pull day?

This depends on various factors, like overall fitness goals, what your experience is with training and how fast you typically recover. It’ll also depend on how much time you’ve set aside for yourself each week to work out.

Generally, most people find it reasonable to train pull day workouts 1-3 times per week, usually two. For example, if you were working on a push-pull-legs (PPL) split, you might do: Push on Monday, pull on Tuesday, and legs on Wednesday.

Take Thursday as a rest day, then repeat the cycle in the latter half of the week: Push Friday, pull Saturday, legs Sunday. Overall, you’d be hitting pull day twice in this program.

Here's a breakdown based on different scenarios:

Muscle Size

If you want bigger muscles (Also known as muscular hypertrophy), twice-weekly workouts with high volume at medium to heavy weight can be effective. Learn more about hypertrophy here: Maximizing Muscle Hypertrophy.

Strength

To get strong AF,  training your pulling muscles once a week with heavy weights and low to moderate reps (4-6 reps) may be your best bet. Here, you want to lift heavy, even working towards hitting your one-rep (or 5-6 rep) maxes during heavy sets. For strength, work toward progressively increasing your weight each pull day session (progressive overload) each time you lift.

Endurance

Endurance training means higher reps (around 10-15) of lighter weight. This can help you improve your cardio and muscular endurance. It’s a good way to burn more calories and get a healthier heart. Here’s some additional information on how endurance training may be helpful: Health Benefits of Endurance Training.

Big Picture

You can pull your life together by pulling yourself into shape.

Okay, maybe a bit of an exaggeration. But a pull day workout is one surefire way to start strengthening your back muscles to build more functional power at the back of your body.

Incorporating pull day workouts into your weekly routine can benefit your strength, looks, athleticism and functional movement.

By working on exercises like TRX rows, pull-ups, and face pulls, you can work towards a better-built back and optimal posterior chain health and strength.

References

Huang, J., Zhong, M., & Wang, J. (2022). Effects of Exercise-Based Interventions on Functional Movement Capability in Untrained Populations: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. International journal of environmental research and public health, 19(15), 9353. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19159353

Krzysztofik, M., Wilk, M., Wojdała, G., & Gołaś, A. (2019). Maximizing Muscle Hypertrophy: A Systematic Review of Advanced Resistance Training Techniques and Methods. International journal of environmental research and public health, 16(24), 4897. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16244897

Mrówczyński W. (2019). Health Benefits of Endurance Training: Implications of the Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor-A Systematic Review. Neural plasticity, 2019, 5413067. https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/5413067

Padulo, J., Laffaye, G., Chamari, K., & Concu, A. (2013). Concentric and eccentric: muscle contraction or exercise?. Sports health, 5(4), 306. https://doi.org/10.1177/1941738113491386

Tataryn, N., Simas, V., Catterall, T., Furness, J., & Keogh, J. W. L. (2021). Posterior-Chain Resistance Training Compared to General Exercise and Walking Programmes for the Treatment of Chronic Low Back Pain in the General Population: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Sports medicine - open, 7(1), 17. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40798-021-00306-w