maratoolFull Range-Of-Motion Lat Pulldown
How to do the full range-of-motion lat pulldown
- Either standing or seated on a high bench, grasp two stirrup cables that are attached to the high pulleys. Grab with the opposing hand so your arms are crisscrossed about you and your palms are facing forward.
- Keeping your chest up and maintaining a slight arch in your lower back, pull the handles down as if you were doing a regular pulldown. The range of motion will be more of an arc. During the movement, rotate your hands so that in the bottom position your palms face each other rather than forward. Return slowly to the starting position and repeat.
Muscles worked
The prime mover is the latissimus dorsi, which pulls the upper arm down and back toward the ribcage.
Because more than one joint is moving, the work does not stay in one place: the biceps add force at the elbow; the mid-back retracts the shoulder blades so the shoulder has something solid to work from; the deltoids stabilise the shoulder and add force at the top of the range.
Every exercise for:LatsBicepsMiddle backShoulders
How this movement works
The load travels toward you and several joints bend to bring it there. The arms finish work the back starts, so grip and elbow flexors sit in the path of every repetition: when people stall on a compound pull, it is more often the hands giving out than the primary muscle running out of force.
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 lats too, using equipment this one does not:
- Latissimus Dorsi-SMRfoam roll
- Leverage Iso Rowmachine
- Narrow Parallel Grip Chin-upsbarbell + body only
- Overhead Slammedicine ball
- Pullupsbody only
Difficulty
Listed at intermediate level. It assumes you already own the underlying pattern and can hold position under load — if the position breaks before the target muscle tires, drop back to a beginner variation until it does not.
Of the 45 lats exercises in this database, 14 are listed at intermediate level.
Photos: free-exercise-db — public domain (Unlicense) Full attribution →
ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.