Straight-Arm Pulldown
Trains the Lats.
- Equipment
- Cable
- Mechanic
- Isolation
- Force
- Pull
- Level
- Beginner
How to do it
- Attach a straight bar to a high cable pulley and stand a step back from it, feet hip-width apart.
- Take an overhand grip a little narrower than shoulder-width and hinge forward slightly at the hips, chest up.
- Start with the bar at about head height, arms almost straight with a soft bend at the elbows.
- Keeping that elbow angle fixed, pull the bar down in an arc until it reaches your thighs. The movement happens at the shoulder, not the elbow.
- Squeeze at the bottom, then let the bar travel back up along the same arc under control until your arms are extended in front of you again.
Common mistakes
- Bending the elbows, which turns the movement into a pushdown and hands the work to the triceps. Set the elbow angle at the start and keep it.
- Standing too upright. Without a slight forward hinge the arc is short and the lat never reaches a stretched position at the top.
- Using a pressing weight. Because the arms are long levers with the elbows locked, the load has to be modest. Heavy here means the torso starts doing it.
- Overlooking what it is for. Because the elbow is out of the equation, the biceps cannot take over — which makes this one of the few pulling movements where the latissimus dorsi and teres major get a genuinely larger share of the work.