We’ve all been there, eager to get our training done so we do another full body workout with lots of compound movements to ensure that every muscle gets some sort of workout. To really grow specific muscles, targeting them in isolation alongside your full body exercises will get you the best results and you’ll see more muscle mass gains.

Why Use a Cable Machine?

Dumbbells and barbells are subject to variable loading throughout the exercise as a result of the position of the weight relative to the working joint. As the weight moves further away from being vertically in line with the working joint, the lever arm increases, and the muscles have to work harder.

All The Cable Machine Exercises You Need

1 - Cable Bicep Curl

This targets the biceps in isolation, helping strengthen them for compound exercises like chin ups or barbell rows and also helping with improve shoulder health, given the supporting role the biceps play in shoulder function.

2 - Cable Rope Tricep Extension

Also known as the cable pushdown, this is a great exercise for powerlifters, Olympic lifters or even those who play game sports like tennis players, for whom strong elbows are important.

This exercise is great for accumulating targeted volume at tendons and muscles surrounding the elbows so that they are less likely to flare up during heavy compound exercises like bench press, split jerks or a tennis swing.

3 - 2 Down 1 Up Tricep Extension

The 2 down 1 up cable tricep extension utilises eccentric overload, exposing your triceps to more load during the eccentric portion of the lift than you’d be able to handle during the concentric. This is great for improving mobility and strength.

4 - Cable Lateral Rotation

Also known as the cable abdominal twist, this loads your body heavily through the transverse plane, otherwise known as rotation, which is essential for sporting movements like a golf swing or sprinting, which is the product of multiple alternating transverse rotations. It is also great for targeting the core muscles.

5 - Cable Lateral Raise

This targets to middle of the deltoids, using the cables constant resistance to target it through the full movement, instead of just the top portion of the exercise.

6 - Cross Over Cable Reverse Fly

This targets the often-neglected rear delts. If you want to build some real ‘boulder shoulders’ then targeting the whole deltoid is important, instead of just the front of your shoulders.

7 - Cable Chest Press

The cable chest press is not limited in its range of motion like a barbell bench press is, it thus allows you to train your pressing muscles through a greater range of motion.

8 - Cable Fly

Similar to the cable chest press, this allows you to train your upper body through a greater range of motion than typical exercises, but this variation further stretches the chest muscles because the elbows do less work, isolating the chest further.

9 - Cable Front Raise

This targets to anterior deltoids, the front of your shoulder, using the cables constant resistance to target it through the full movement, instead of just the top portion of the exercise.

10 - Cable Lat Pull Down

This is a great way to accumulate high amounts of vertical pulling volume to supplement your pull ups or chin ups if you struggle to hit a lot of reps on your chin ups or pull ups. You can also use it to help you build up to your first pull up or chin up.

11 - Cable Assisted Reverse Lunge

This, unlike most cable exercises, is used to make the movement easier. If you struggle with single leg work, this is a great way to add some assistance to make it easier from the start of the movement, instead of just giving you assistance when already at the bottom of the exercise, which can help for those lacking confidence.

12 - Cable Face Pull Isometric

This uses an isometric contraction to accumulate volume at specific joint angles. This is great if you find I hard to load your rear delts and traps due to weakness in those areas, because you are forced to load them for long spells.

13 - Cable Chest Supported Row

The chest support allows you to heavily target your traps at high intensities without other body parts fatiguing first and reducing your ability to keep performing reps. This is a great alternative to a prone row if you don’t have the highly specialised equipment for it.

14 - Cable Upright Row

A great exercise for strengthening the shoulder in an elevated, internally rotated position, protecting against future rotator cuff injury or pain. This is a great exercise for Olympic lifters or functional lifters that require strong shoulders, robust through high levels of rotation.

15 - Cable Crunch

Sit ups and crunches can sometimes be hard to progress because, past a certain point, it can be tough to make them more intense without performing endless amounts of reps. This is a great way to overload the traditional crunch or sit up in a standardised manner.

It is also a great variation if you want to regress a sit up because you can choose the range of motion that you want to work through and at what load, depending on your current capacity for load.

16 - Cable Pull Through

The cable pull through can be a good variation to teach people how to effectively hinge at the hips. The cable pulls your hips back to the wall behind you, which can be hard for people to learn on their own.

17 - Cable Kickback

This is a nice variation to target the glutes, without the heavy axial loading (spinal loading) that comes with heavy squats or deadlifts, which can make it very useful during the early stages of someone’s gym journey or even during rehab if you are dealing with a bad back. It also works the glutes unilaterally, so can be used to reduce side to side strength imbalances.

18 - Seated Cable Row

The seated cable row, without the chest support, increases the demand for core stability because the chest support is not there to do it for you, as you row the cable into your body. You can use this as a progression to the chest supported row if you want to progress the amount of trunk stability required in your row.

19 - Shoulder Press

This improves your vertical pushing and overhead strength. It is considered a key function for day-to-day tasks like lifting an object onto a high shelf or sporting actions like lifting a player up in a rugby line out.  Humans are inherently weak at overhead pressing, so working on it in the gym is really useful.

20 - Side Bend

This forces you to lateral flex and extend your trunk/core, strengthening your obliques, improving your functional capacity for movements that require a degree of lateral flexion, for instance, picking up the shopping or even running or changing direction in sport.

21 - Side Lunge

The side lunge is a great variation to load your lower body in the frontal plane, which is often somewhat neglected in favour of more sagittal plane dominant movements in the gym, like squats or deadlifts. It can also improve your mobility for exercises like squat by improving your strength and mobility at your adductors, which typically limits squat depth and strength.

22 - Kneeling Hip Abduction

This improves you hips capacity for load in an abducted position, which may be helpful for sports which require a lot of hip strength, especially those with a wide degree of hip loading patterns, like football or rugby.

23 - Hip Abduction

This can be used as a progression to the kneeling variation by moving you further away from the floor, reducing the size of your base of support and thus demanding more stability from you.

24 - Hip Adduction

Adductor injuries are common in games sports and can be very tough to overcome, so using this variation to target your adductors can be useful to build extra robustness.

25 - Single Arm Chest Fly

Similar to the bilateral cable chest fly, this trains the chest through long muscle lengths, making it a good exercise for chest hypertrophy. However, this variation loads one side at a time, offsetting the load on the trunk and thus increasing the anti-rotational forces required from the trunk.

26 - Knee Raises

This variation heavily targets the hip flexor concentrically, which can be a good variation for those that do a lot of walking or running in day-to-day life or sport, strengthening the hip flexors, which can get injured and be heavily debilitating.

27 - Woodchoppers

Similar to the cable abdominal twist, this is a great variation to load your core in the transverse plane. Improving your rotational strength and power, which is an essential quality in sports like tennis or cricket.

28 - Bent Over Row

Often, rowing variations are easiest at the bottom of the movement. The bent over cable row variation eliminates this issue because of the constant loading pattern, thus loading the row heavily, even when at long muscle lengths.

29 - Shrugs

Shrugs are a great exercise for strengthening your traps without inducing much fatigue to the rest of your body, which can be useful for athletes like Olympic weightlifters that want to strengthen their traps with extra volume outside of their heavy main lifts.

30 - Calf Raises

Calf raises can be hard to load through longer muscle lengths because they are typically hardest at the top of the exercise. This may be detrimental to your gains because of the benefit that training at long muscle lengths can have on hypertrophy. Using a cable machine for your calf raises is therefore a great way to load your calves through a large range of motion.

31 - Pallof Press

The pallof press is a great way to introduce athletes to transverse plane targeted exercise because it works you isometrically in the transverse plane and thus does not require the mobility that abdominal twists do.

32 - Plank Pull Throughs

The plank pull through can be used as a progression to the traditional isometric plank if you wish to progress the anti-rotational demands on the trunk. Again, this can be great for those new to transverse plane targeted exercise but also for more elite athletes that need to be able to resist anti rotational movement, for example, an Olympic weightlifter in the catch position of a snatch.

Get yourself a Cable Machine set up today and add these cable exercises into your training regime now to accumulate some targeted volume to leave no stone unturned in your pursuit of more gains! Our advice is to rotate your accessories somewhat periodically, around your main lifts, so that you keep it fresh and keep your training fun, while also giving the exercises enough time to make a difference.

Written by guest author Ewan Hammond.

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Tags: Equipment > Power Racks and Cages ; Exercise Type > Conditioning