Front Cable Raises

🎯 Shoulders🏋️ CableIsolationChest (2°)Forearms (2°)

How to do the front cable raises

  1. Place the pulley on the setting just above the floor.
  2. Stand with your feet shoulder width apart, your abs drawn in and your knees slightly bent.
  3. Starting at waist height, take the pulley in your left hand, palm facing the floor with otherwise known as an overhand grip, and raise your straight arm up towards your left shoulder.
  4. At shoulder height pause for a moment.
  5. With a controlled movement resist the weight and slowly lower your arm back to starting position at your waist.
  6. Repeat the exercise with your right arm.

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 chest adds pushing force at the shoulder; the forearms hold the grip, which is often what gives out first.

Every exercise for:ShouldersChestForearms

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.