Bent-over Lateral Cable Raises

🎯 Shoulders🏋️ CableIsolationTraps (2°)Middle back (2°)

How to do the bent-over lateral cable raises

  1. Grasp the handle of the low pulley with your right hand.
  2. Bend forward from the waist; your upper body should be nearly parallel with the floor. Bend your knees slightly and place your left hand on your left thigh. Let your right arm hang from your shoulder in front of you with your elbow slightly bent. This is your starting position.
  3. Lift your right arm, keeping your elbow slightly bent.
  4. Keep moving your arm until it is parallel to the floor, in line with your right ear.
  5. Slowly bring the weight back down to the starting position.
  6. Perform exercise on left arm and then repeat.

Muscles worked

The prime movers are the deltoids, which raise and rotate the upper arm at the shoulder joint.

Even with a single joint doing the moving, the muscle is not working alone — the traps anchor the shoulder blade against the load; the mid-back retracts the shoulder blades so the shoulder has something solid to work from.

Every exercise for:ShouldersTrapsMiddle back

How this movement works

Everything happens at one joint. That gives you direct control over where the tension sits; the trade-off is that the muscle gets no help, so the load that feels hard here is a fraction of what a multi-joint version of the pattern would take. Slow, complete repetitions beat heavy ones.

It is filed under strength: produce force against resistance for a countable number of repetitions, and progress the resistance over time.

What you need

A cable holds tension for the whole range, including the point where a free weight would go slack. Moving the pulley changes the angle the resistance arrives from without changing the movement.

Every exercise using:Cable

These train the shoulders too, using equipment this one does not:

Related exercises

Illustration: Everkinetic — CC BY-SA 4.0 — license. Modified versions are shared under the same license. Full attribution →

ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.