Straight-Arm Pulldown
A standing single-joint lat movement on the high pulley: a wide bar, locked elbows, and a long sweeping arc from overhead to your thighs. Because the elbow never bends, the biceps cannot rescue the rep, which makes it the cleanest way to learn what a lat contraction actually feels like.
Own the movement
Set up first, then execute. Every cue below is something you can check on your next set.
Before the first rep
- Take a pronated grip on a wide bar at the high pulley, hands slightly wider than your shoulders.
- Step back two feet or so, until your arms are fully reaching forward and up with the stack lifted off the rack.
- Hinge roughly 30 degrees at the hips, chest tall, back flat — the lean gives the bar somewhere to travel.
- Set a slight, fixed bend in the elbows to spare the joint, then hold that angle for the entire set.
- Squeeze the bar and pull your shoulder blades down out of your ears before the first rep.
Every rep
Breathing & tempo — Exhale as you sweep the bar down, inhale as it returns overhead. About one second down, a one-second squeeze, three seconds back up under control.
Sets, reps & load
Where to start, and what to change when it stops being hard.
Begin with 10-20 kg on the stack. The right weight is one where the last rep still finishes at your thighs with a one-second squeeze and no torso movement. Progress by adding reps to the top of the range first, then a single plate — jumping the stack on a single-joint movement is how the elbows start bending.
What goes wrong
The errors that show up most often, and the cue that fixes each one.
Halve the weight and hold the same elbow angle from start to finish. A good check: if the bar passes closer to your body than an arm's length, your elbows have folded.
Hinge about 30 degrees at the hips and step back until the cable is taut with your arms overhead. The forward lean is what creates the arc.
Return until your hands are above head height and you feel a stretch under the armpit, then start the next rep from there. The stretched position is where this movement pays.
Fix your hips over your heels and brace the abs. If the load only moves when your chest rises, drop a plate and let the lats do the work.
Why bother
Every other back movement lets the arms take over. Here the elbow angle is fixed, so the only joint doing work is the shoulder and the only muscle with the leverage to extend it under this line of pull is the lat. That constraint is the whole value of the movement.
It also loads a part of the range that pulldowns barely touch. At the top your arms are out in front of your head with the lats fully lengthened, and the resistance is highest exactly there, where a pulldown is at its weakest and easiest point.
Where it fits
Two or three sets at the end of a back session, or a couple of light sets before your first heavy pull as a warm-up that switches the lats on. It does not compete for recovery with rows or chin-ups, so you can run it twice a week without thinking about it.
If this one isn't it
No kit, too hard, or too easy — here's where to go instead.
Same job, different kit
Asked and answered
Does this build lat width?
It builds the lats, and bigger lats read as a wider back. But no exercise selectively trains a muscle's width — the bar angle does not decide the shape you inherited. Train the lats hard through a full range with whatever loads best and let the shape look after itself.
Straight arm pulldown or pullover?
They train the same shoulder extension. The cable keeps tension constant across the whole arc; a dumbbell pullover loses almost all resistance at the top of the rep, where the lat is shortest. If you have a cable, use it.
How much should my elbows bend?
A few degrees, fixed for the whole set, purely so you are not hyperextending the joint under load. What matters is that the angle does not change: the moment it opens and closes, you are doing a pulldown with a very inefficient grip.
Why do I feel it in my lower back instead?
Usually you are hinging too far forward and holding that position with your erectors while a heavy stack tries to pull you over. Reduce the lean to about 30 degrees, brace your abs, and take weight off the stack until your torso stops fighting the cable.