TA, do you feel like you can get more of a contraction and squeeze when doing lat pulldowns due to more control over the weight, as opposed to law pulldowns? I mean, both sort of mimic the same motion, just in different directions.
Totally! Plus you can do drop sets and really focus on the muscles. Bring down and pause and really focusing on pulling with the lower arms and elbows while keeping forearms and biceps out of it as much as possible. With pullups, its possible to do that, but the biceps will always fatigue first and have a lot of involvement.
The way I do pullups is different than what I see most people doing. Most people I see short stroke them whereas I would always go all the way up and all the way down even pausing just a second at the bottom. Even doing that, which is the way I always have, still is not as good as the Lat Pulldown for me. The whole Pullups are better than Lat Pulldowns is a bunch of nonsense bullshit.