maratoolLying One Arm Rear Lateral Raise
How to do the lying one arm rear lateral raise
- Lay face down on a flat bench high enough for your arms to hang down to the floor.
- Place a dumbbell at your side.
- Your other hand not grasping the dumbbell can be on the floor stabilising your movements.
- Grasp the dumbbell in your hand and raise your upper arm to shoulder height.
- Keep your arm straight and perpendicular to your chest with a slight bend in the elbow.
- In a slow controlled manner lower your arm to starting position.
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 mid-back retracts the shoulder blades so the shoulder has something solid to work from.
Every exercise for:ShouldersMiddle back
How this movement works
One joint changes angle and the resistance travels toward you along a single arc. Nothing is positioned to help, so tension stays where you aimed it and the usable load drops sharply against a multi-joint pull for the same muscle. Protect the range of motion; buying weight by shortening the arc defeats the point.
It is filed under strength: produce force against resistance for a countable number of repetitions, and progress the resistance over time.
What you need
Dumbbells let each side work on its own, surfacing a strength difference between limbs that a barbell would quietly cover for, and leaving the wrist free to rotate through the movement.
A bench fixes the torso angle and gives you something to drive against, which is what lets the load go up without your position wandering.
Every exercise using:DumbbellBench
These train the shoulders too, using equipment this one does not:
- Machine Shoulder (Military) Pressmachine
- Medicine Ball Scoop Throwmedicine ball
- Narrow Parallel Grip Chin-upsbarbell + body only
- One-Arm Kettlebell Clean and Jerkkettlebell
- Seated Cable Shoulder Presscable
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 141 shoulders exercises in this database, 46 are listed at intermediate level.
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.