Lat pulldown: muscles worked and how to do it

How to do a lat pulldown

1. 1Set the thigh pad so your thighs are pressed firmly under it with your feet flat on the floor.
2. 2Stand up, take the bar with an overhand grip a little wider than your shoulders, and sit down with your arms straight overhead.
3. 3Lean back slightly, about 10 to 20 degrees, and lift your chest.
4. 4Start by drawing your shoulders down, away from your ears.
5. 5Pull your elbows down and in towards your sides until the bar reaches your upper chest, around your collarbones.
6. 6Let the bar rise under control until your arms are straight again and you feel a stretch in your lats.

Cues that help

• "Elbows to your back pockets": pull with your elbows, not your hands, and your lats do the work.
• "Chest up to meet the bar": a lifted chest gives the bar a place to land and keeps your back from rounding.
• "Shoulders down, then pull": set your shoulder blades before your elbows bend.
• "Slow on the way up": the bar should rise, not yank your arms up.

Common mistakes

• Leaning far back and rowing the bar down. A small lean is fine; lying back turns it into a different exercise and lets you use more weight than your lats can handle.
• Pulling the bar behind your neck. It forces your shoulders into an awkward position and adds nothing; pull to the front.
• Stopping short at the top. Letting your arms straighten fully gives your lats their stretch.
• Using your body weight to start the pull. If you have to jerk your torso, the weight is too heavy.
• Shrugging up at the top or bottom. Keep your shoulders away from your ears.

How wide should you grip?

Wider is not automatically better for your lats. A study of 15 men compared narrow, medium and wide overhand grips (1, 1.5 and 2 times their shoulder width). Lat activity was similar across the three, and they lifted slightly more with the narrow and medium grips than with the wide one (Andersen et al., 2014).

The authors concluded that any grip between one and two shoulder widths should work the muscles about equally. A grip a little wider than your shoulders, where your forearms are roughly vertical at the bottom, is a good default.

Sets, reps and weight

• For muscle: 3 to 4 sets of 8 to 15 reps, stopping 1 to 3 reps short of failure.
• Rest 1.5 to 2 minutes between sets.
• Pick a weight you can pull to your chest with your torso still. Add weight once you reach the top of your rep range on every set.
• As a step towards pull-ups: the heavier you can pull for clean sets of 8 to 10, the closer you are. Practise pull-up negatives alongside it.

Variations and alternatives

• Close-grip or neutral-grip pulldown: palms facing each other on a V-handle. Easy on the shoulders and lets you pull strongly.
• Underhand-grip pulldown: palms facing you. More biceps, like a chin-up.
• Single-arm cable pulldown: one side at a time, with a longer range of motion.
• Pull-up and chin-up: the same movement with your body weight.
• Straight-arm pulldown: arms straight, the bar swept down to your thighs. Works the lats without the biceps.

Tracking your lat pulldowns

PushBeyond logs the weight and reps of each set and charts the history of the exercise, so you can see the weight go up over the weeks. Its muscle map counts the lat pulldown for your lats, with biceps and upper back as secondary muscles.