Exercise library

How to do the Rope Straight-Arm Pulldown

A beginner isolation exercise using cable, working the lats.

Primary musclesLats
Secondary musclesNone recorded
EquipmentCable
LevelBeginner
TypeIsolation
ForcePull

Steps

  1. Attach a rope to a high pulley and make your weight selection. Stand a couple feet back from the pulley with your feet staggered and take the rope with both hands. Lean forward from the hip, keeping your back straight, with your arms extended up in front of you. This will be your starting position.
  2. Keeping your arms straight, extend the shoulder to pull the rope down to your thighs.
  3. Pause at the bottom of the motion, squeezing your lats.
  4. Return to the starting position without allowing the weight to fully rest on the stack.

Tracking it in OneRep

Add the rope straight-arm pulldown 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.