The resistance band lateral raise is an excellent supplementary exercise to incorporate in your workouts to work the muscles of the shoulder.
While not a main movement, including the lateral raise into your workouts will help you isolate the lateral head of the deltoid muscle. Building this particular shoulder muscle can help you look broader. And, even if looking broader isn’t your primary goal, your shoulders will look more defined by including the exercise in your workout routine.
The primary benefit of using resistance bands is that the exercise becomes more challenging the closer you get to a full contraction. For the banded lateral raise, this will be the point at which your arms are raised close to parallel to the floor.
To make the exercise more challenging, you can focus on increasing duration of the lowering phase by fighting the resistance of the band and lowering your arms slowly. This will keep the muscle engaged longer and help you build your shoulders.
How to Perform Resistance Band Lateral Raises
- Grab the handles or sides of the resistance band and hold it out in front of you.
- Align the midpoint of the band with the midpoint of your body.
- Lower the middle of the band to the floor.
- Take a shoulder width stance by stepping onto the band one foot at a time ensuring that you maintain the midpoint alignment of the band with your torso.
- Engage your core to maintain proper posture.
- Keep a slight bend in your elbows and slowly raise your arms to form a standing T with your body.
- Once your arms have reached parallel with the floor, squeeze your shoulders and reverse the movement back to the starting position.
- Repeat for the desired number of repetitions.
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed how to perform the resistance band lateral raise as well as described the muscles used in performing the exercise.
The exercise can be added to your full body workouts, upper body workouts, and/or shoulder workouts.
A general recommendation would be to perform 2-4 sets of resistance band lateral raises for 8-15 repetitions per set.
You can progress with the exercise by increasing the resistance of the band used to perform the exercise, increasing the reps/sets performed of the exercise, or by advancing to a dumbbell or cable variation of the exercise.
If you have any questions after reading the article, please feel free to leave a comment down below.