Dumbbell Lying Rear Lateral Raise
Face down on a bench angled about 15 degrees off the floor, both arms hang straight down and sweep out to the sides until they are level with your shoulders. The bench does the work your lower back would otherwise do in a standing bent-over version, which is exactly the point.
Own the movement
Set up first, then execute. Every cue below is something you can check on your next set.
Before the first rep
- Set the bench low — about 15 degrees from the floor — so both dumbbells hang clear without touching down.
- Lie chest-down with your forehead past the top of the pad and your feet braced on the floor or the bench legs.
- Let both arms hang straight below the shoulders, palms facing each other, elbows softly bent and then locked at that angle.
- Press your chest into the pad so your ribs stay down and the movement cannot become a back extension.
- Choose dumbbells around 4-8 kg. Two of them is not a reason to go heavier than you would on one side.
Every rep
Breathing & tempo — Exhale on the way out, inhale on the way down. One second up, one second held at parallel, two to three seconds lowering — this movement is ruined by speed more than most.
Sets, reps & load
Where to start, and what to change when it stops being hard.
Begin with a pair of 4-6 kg dumbbells and expect the last five reps to be genuinely hard. Controlling 8-10 kg per hand for 15 strict reps with a pause at parallel is a good intermediate marker. Add reps up to 20 before adding weight, then step up 2 kg per hand and restart at 12.
What goes wrong
The errors that show up most often, and the cue that fixes each one.
Cue the sternum staying glued to the bench for the entire set. If it lifts, the dumbbells are too heavy — cut the load by a third and stop the set when the chest first comes away.
Let the shoulder blades stay quiet and think about the upper arm rotating away from the midline. Retraction turns this into a rhomboid and mid-trap exercise, which you already get from rowing.
Set the stopping point at shoulder height and hold there for a full second. Anything above parallel is upper trap, and the pause makes overshooting impossible to fake.
Raise the bench a notch, or lower the weights only until the arms are fully hanging. Rebounding off the floor removes the hardest part of the rep, which is the first 20 degrees.
Why bother
The rear deltoid is the only head of the shoulder most people never train directly, because pressing hits the front, lateral raises hit the side, and rowing recruits the back of the shoulder only as a bystander to the lats. This position isolates it by removing every other option: the chest is pinned to a pad, the hips are supported, and the arms have nowhere to go but out.
It also makes the sets honest. In a standing bent-over raise, the lower back and hamstrings are usually the first thing to quit, so the set ends before the rear delt has done much. Lying down means the shoulder is the only thing that can fail, and lets you work in the 15-20 rep range where a small muscle at the end of a long lever actually accumulates useful tension.
Where it fits
As accessory work after your heavy pulling or pressing, two or three times a week. Three sets of 12-20 with a pause at the top is a full dose. If your posture rounds forward at a desk all day, this and face pulls earn their place more than another set of curls.
If this one isn't it
No kit, too hard, or too easy — here's where to go instead.
Same job, different kit
Start here instead
When this gets easy
Asked and answered
Is this better than the standing bent-over version?
For the rear delt, yes. Standing bent over, your hamstrings and lower back fatigue first and you end up cutting sets short or swinging with the hips. The bench removes both problems. The only advantage the standing version keeps is that it needs no bench and trains you to hold a hinge under load.
Should I feel this between my shoulder blades?
No. That means you are retracting the scapulae and doing a reverse fly for the rhomboids and mid-traps. Keep the shoulder blades relaxed and think about the upper arm swinging away from your body. The target sensation is at the back of the shoulder capsule itself.
How heavy can I go on rear delt raises?
Much lighter than pride suggests. 4-8 kg is a normal starting point, and 10-12 kg per hand for 15 strict reps with a pause is already strong. The moment your chest lifts off the pad or the elbows start bending to lever the weight up, you have crossed the useful load and are just moving iron.
How often should I train rear delts?
Two or three times a week. It is a small muscle doing short-range, low-load work, so it recovers fast and responds better to frequency than to one brutal weekly session. Six to nine hard sets a week spread across sessions is a sensible target.