How to do the lat pulldown for a stronger upper body

Alice-Rose Miller, PT, Kate Cheng

9 January 2025 at 4:54 am·9-min read

The lat pulldown is a vertical pulling exercise that strengthens and builds multiple muscles in the back. While focusing on your back is often overlooked in favour of working 'trendier' muscles like your glutes and abs, strong lats and traps can help improve your posture, reduce risk of injury, increase athletic performance and boost your upper-body strength in general. Clearly, lots want to nail this move, considering 18.1k people search for 'lat pulldown' monthly.

As a strength exercise, it primarily works the latissimus dorsi (otherwise known as ‘the lats’), which is also the biggest muscle in the upper body. Fun fact: the name comes from a rough Latin translation of 'broadest' (latissimus) and 'back' (dorsi). As one of the most popular exercises to train in the gym, it's crucial to understand why and how we need to do it.

Here to help us is Alice-Rose Miller, PT, strength coach and weightlifter. She'll break down how to do the lat pulldown with correct form, benefits of the lat pulldown, common mistakes and variations.

Meet the expert: Alice-Rose Miller is a PT, strength coach and weightlifter. She was named 2023 Les Mills AKL City PT of the Year.

What is the lat pulldown exercise?

The lat pulldown is a strength exercise that works your back muscles performed at a cable machine. Facilitating a vertical pull movement, there are a few different types of lat pulldown machines that you can use in the gym, but two are the most common.

1. Standard cable lat pulldown

This is where you can interchange attachments (handles) depending on what grip you prefer (more on that later). This machine comes with a stack of pre-loaded numbered plates that you select with a pin, and is most likely to be the machine that you have on your gym floor.

2. Plate-loaded lat pulldown

Another common machine is the plate-loaded lat pulldown, which uses a leverage system and has space for plates to be loaded onto the machine. You can choose to use it single arm or both at once. Usually you can only do overhand or underhand with this, so you have fewer grip options available.

Muscles worked

The lat pulldown is a compound exercise, so it works multiple joints – the shoulder and elbow – and therefore muscles.

The muscles involved in the movement are:

latissimus dorsi (large, flat muscle running from mid to lower back)
rhomboids (pair of muscles in upper back)
trapezius (large flat muscle that runs from base of skull to lower back)
teres major (small muscle connecting shoulder blade and upper arm)
rear deltoids (back of the shoulder)
biceps
forearms

There will be some variations to muscle activation based on which grip you use.

How to do a lat pulldown with correct form

Here's my step-by-step guide.

1. Establish your goal (strength, hypertrophy, muscular endurance)

Before we sit down on the machine, we need to establish our rep range and goal for the session. Are we working in the lower range for strength? Or do we want slightly higher reps for hypertrophy? We want to select a weight that we can perform the desired reps with.

When learning a new movement, it’s also important to have an easy-to-moderate load. This is to ensure correct form, and there is no compensation using momentum in order to complete the rep effectively.

2. Select your weight and grip

Once a rep scheme and goal are chosen, select your weight by inserting the pin if using the cable lat pulldown, or adding a plate if using the plate loaded lat pulldown.

Then decide if you want to utilise a wide grip, neutral or narrow grip (more on that later as well), with palms up or down – choose the attachment that best suits your goal.

2. Adjust the seat and pad height

Some machines will have a seat that moves, while others will have a thigh pad that moves. You want these to be snug, as this pad keeps you locked in and stabilised.

3. Grab the handles

A) Lean back slightly to ensure you’re in line with the cable.

B) The rep begins with fully extended arms whilst sitting on the seat.

C) With a controlled pulling motion (not a yank!), pull to above or just touching the upper chest. Avoid swinging the body too much and ensure control throughout the rep.

D) Squeeze and hold for a moment before extending the arms back in a controlled motion, all the way to your start position.

Tip: Be mindful here not to let the weight pull you back to the start.

Use your muscles to control the eccentric portion of the movement (raising the bar back up). The eccentric component of the movement (where the main muscle involved in the movement lengthens) is as important as the concentric (where the muscle contracts).

Benefits of the lat pulldown

It’s common knowledge that the lat pulldown is a staple exercises in the gym – commonly the one you have to queue for at peak time! – and variations of the machine are found on every gym floor.

1. Provides an efficient workout

The lat pulldown offers so much ‘bang for your buck’ because it’s a large compound exercise, where multiple joints are moving and more muscles are being trained. A study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that the lat pulldown activates the latissimus dorsi and supporting muscles like the rhomboids and trapezius regardless of grip.

It’s important to include a variety of compound exercises in a workout, especially if you have limited time, and to focus on full-body sessions.

2. Builds back muscle

Training the lat pulldown is arguably the best exercise to build muscle in your back and is highly beneficial for strength gains, aiding in your development of exercises like pull-ups. Research supports this, with one study examining the muscle activation during lat exercises like the pulldown and rows finding that the lats were the most engaged during wide-grip pulldown.

3. Can improve shoulder health

Another great benefit of the lat pulldown exercise is that it is excellent in improving shoulder health. According to NASM, because the lat pulldown engages muscles around the shoulder blade, such as the teres major and deltoids, the move can help increase shoulder stability. The lat pulldown is also is a similar movement to hanging from a bar, which is well regarded in the shoulder mobility space.

4. Improves posture

Livestrong recommends the lat pulldown as an exercise that can correct rounded and slumped over posture, as it keeps your spine aligned. As the lats help retract your shoulder blades, they pull your upper body back and allow you to maintain an upright position.

5. Prevents injury

A strong back provides stability and support for the shoulder joint and spine, says PT Yash Agarwal at Health Shots.

Common mistakes of the lat pulldown

1. Letting the cable rise too quickly

A common mistake in this exercise is allowing the cable to rise too quickly during the upward motion (eccentric portion) of the rep, resulting in lack of control. This means that there is less tension on the muscle, and thus less muscle activation. You’re leaving some gains on the table!

2. Pulling too low

The most common mistake seen in the gym is when the bar is pulled too low, below the chest. It will feel like the bar is being pushed downwards, causing the shoulders to roll forward. The easiest way to correct this – think about keeping the wrists straight and pulling to the upper chest.

3. Going too heavy

Using a heavier weight with some momentum can be beneficial if you’ve mastered the movement pattern and understand the positions the body needs to be in. However, if you’re learning a new movement pattern and loading the pulldown too heavy, it can mean that you may be moving incorrectly by activating the wrong muscles just to shift the load. Choose a light-to-moderate weight.

4. Allowing your grip to be the limiting factor

As you’ve learnt, your forearms do get trained during this exercise. This is great for building strength, but if our grip isn’t as strong as our back, then our grip holds us back. That’s where lifting straps come in. Using lifting straps with certain attachments will allow you to get more out of your sets without letting your forearms hold you back.

Variations of the lat pulldown

What's great about the cable lat pulldown is that there are so many grip variations.

1. Different grip widths

There are three different grip widths:

wide (greater than shoulder width)
close or neutral (shoulder width)
neutral (in between wide and narrow)

2. Different grip orientations

There are also three grip orientations:

palms facing up or towards you (supination)
palms facing down or away (pronation)
palms facing inward (neutral grip)

3. Overall variations

You can combine different grips orientations and widths.

1. Close width – supinated, pronated or neutral

Generally, it’s suggested to focus on the front loaded lat pulldown variations to ensure proper joint alignment and a better overall position is obtained.

The narrow and neutral grip variations have slightly more bicep activation during the eccentric phase of the lift.

2. Wide width – supinated, pronated or neutral

By changing up the grip variation, it places more or less emphasis on the muscles worked during the exercise. Some people believe that the wide grip variation activates more lats than its narrower grip counterparts, but this isn’t entirely true. Different grip variations have similar muscle activation during the concentric phase of the lift.

3. Neutral width – supinated, pronated or neutral

Somewhere between close-grip and wide, your hands should be about shoulder-width apart. This variation hits the entire back effectively, but it's particularly good for the mid and upper back.

4. Behind the neck – pronated

When practising the behind-the-neck lat pulldown, you should have a high level of shoulder mobility due to the load placed on them. Also watch out for jutting your head forward to provide a clear path for the bar, as research has shown this can increase your risk of neck injury and headaches. This variation does not activate more muscles than the regular lat pulldown.

Which grip should I use?

As always, my recommendation is to select a grip that you like and works best for your biomechanics. The outcome will not have a huge difference for the majority of the population.

After one to two months, or when you want a change to your programming, try a different variation and see how it feels!

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