u/Amnz98

Hi! I’ve been going to the gym for a few months now trying to lose weight, and I’ve been following a 3 day PPL routine. On my pull day, one of the exercises I do is lat pulldowns.

Over time I’ve slowly increased the weight I can use, but I’ve never fully felt my back during the exercise. Another thing I’ve noticed is that as the weight gets heavier, my grip starts failing before my back does. The bar basically starts slipping out of my hands even though I still feel like I could keep doing more reps. From what I understand, straps could help with that.

Before trying straps, I wanted to experiment with the different attachments/grips my gym has to see if maybe another one would feel better and help me engage my back more.

Normally I use the standard long lat pulldown bar that basically every gym has (photo 1). Out of all the attachments I tried, the one I liked the most was this one (photo 2). The picture isn’t very clear, so I also found a similar one online so you can see what I mean better (photo 3).

Using this attachment, I actually feel my back working much more during the movement and overall the exercise feels way more comfortable and natural for me. My grip still slips a bit, so I’ll probably still try straps eventually, but this attachment feels significantly better than the regular bar.

What I find strange is that I almost never see people using this type of grip for lat pulldowns online. I mostly see it used for cable exercises, especially for bicep curls.

I’ve only seen maybe 1 or 2 people at my gym using it for pulldowns, so it made me wonder if I’m doing something weird or wrong. At the same time, it’s literally in the attachment rack next to the lat pulldown machine, so I assume it must be fine to use there.

Is it actually correct to use this type of attachment for lat pulldowns? Why does it feel so much better for me compared to the standard bar? What are the actual differences between this grip and the others? Would you recommend sticking with this one?

Thank you!