Cable exercises

A dumbbell or a barbell both go slack at the exact point where gravity stops pulling on the weight — the arm nearly locked out, the hip nearly at the top — but a cable doesn't: it keeps pulling on the muscle through the whole range, from the first inch of the rep to the last. On the triceps pushdown, that means the triceps never gets a break inside the set, not even at the point where a barbell press would have already stopped demanding anything from it. The lat pulldown and the seated cable row use that same advantage for a back pull, and add another: a cable lets you change the angle of pull without switching machines, something a fixed bar can't do. That continuity comes with a double cost — there's no cable stack to carry out of the gym, and of the five it's the one that moves the least total load, so it isn't the tool for chasing a single maximum lift.

Exercises

  1. 1. Face pull

    rear delts and upper back · cable with rope

    The prime mover is the rear delt, the back portion of the shoulder, which rotates the arm backward and helps drive it through the horizontal plane, a motion almost no pressing or vertical pulling exercise loads directly.

  2. 2. Lat pulldown

    back · cable machine

    The prime mover is the lat, the largest muscle in the back, which does most of the work of pulling the arm from overhead down toward the body.

  3. 3. Triceps pushdown

    triceps · cable machine

    The prime mover is the triceps brachii, and here all three heads work fairly evenly since the arm stays pinned to your side the entire time.

  4. 4. Seated cable row

    back · cable machine

    The prime mover is the lat, pulling the arm from in front of you back toward your body with constant tension through the whole range, something the cable delivers that free weight can't match.

  5. 5. Cable crunch

    abs · cable machine

    The prime mover is the rectus abdominis, through its whole length: unlike the floor crunch, which mostly works the upper portion, here the range of spinal flexion tends to run a bit longer, so the lower portion picks up a real share of the work too.

Workouts with these exercises

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Other equipment

Exercises by muscle

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