Steps
- Lie down sideways on an incline bench press with a dumbbell in the hand. Make sure the shoulder is pressing against the incline bench and the arm is lying across your body with the palm around your navel.
- Hold a dumbbell in your uppermost arm while keeping it extended in front of you parallel to the floor. This is your starting position.
- While keeping the dumbbell parallel to the floor at all times, perform a lateral raise. Your arm should travel straight up until it is pointing at the ceiling. Tip: Exhale as you perform this movement. Hold the dumbbell in the position and feel the contraction in the shoulders for a second.
- While inhaling lower the weight across your body back into the starting position.
- Repeat the movement for the prescribed amount of repetitions.
- Switch arms and repeat the movement.
Tracking it in OneRep
Add the one-arm incline lateral raise to a routine and your previous weight and reps sit beside every set, so the decision to add load is made by what is already on the screen rather than by memory. Exercise history and volume trends are one tap away, and logging works offline for the gyms where signal does not reach.
Because OneRep tracks food on the same timeline, a stall on this lift can be read against what you were actually eating that month — which is the difference between a programming problem and an eating one. More on that in tracking progressive overload without a spreadsheet.
Where the instructions come from
The steps above come from free-exercise-db, a public-domain exercise dataset. They are general guidance, not coaching for your body: if a movement hurts, stop and get someone qualified to look at it.