Lateral raise: how to do it and how heavy to go

Muscles the lateral raise works

The lateral raise works the middle part of the shoulder muscle (the middle or side deltoid) hardest. That is the part that makes your shoulders look wider from the front. The front and rear parts of the deltoid help, and the upper trapezius lifts and turns the shoulder blade as your arm rises. A small muscle under the deltoid, the supraspinatus, helps lift the arm too.

Most of that comes from studies that measure electrical activity with skin sensors (EMG). EMG shows which muscles fire, not which ones grow. In 13 trained men lifting 60% of their max for 12 reps, the side delt worked at 30.3% of its maximum in the lateral raise. The shoulder press reached 27.9%, about the same. The bench press reached 5% and the dumbbell fly 3.4%. The lateral raise also worked the rear delt harder than the other 3 lifts.

Growth has been measured only recently. A 2025 study wrote that, as far as its authors knew, no earlier training study had measured side delt thickness. In that study, 24 trained men and women did lateral raises twice a week for 8 weeks. Their side delts grew by 3.3% to 4.6%. In a 10-week preprint study of 20 adults new to lifting, 13 of them women, a lateral raise machine grew the side delt by about 18% to 20%. A preprint has not yet passed peer review, so read that figure with care. No study has compared side delt growth from presses with growth from raises.

How to do a lateral raise

1. Stand with your feet about hip width apart and a dumbbell in each hand, arms hanging at your sides.
2. Turn your palms to face your thighs. Bend your elbows slightly and keep that bend for the whole set.
3. Brace your trunk and lean forward a little from the hips, with your chest up.
4. Pull your shoulders down, away from your ears.
5. Lift your arms out to the sides, a little in front of your body. Lead with your elbows, as if pushing them out to the walls.
6. Stop when your elbows reach shoulder height. Your hands stay level with or just below your elbows, palms facing the floor.
7. Lower the dumbbells back to your sides under control, taking about as long as you took to lift them.
8. Breathe out as you lift and breathe in as you lower.

If you have to rock your body or shrug to get the dumbbells up, pick a lighter pair.

How high, which angle, thumbs up or down

Arm angle and hand position move work between the parts of the shoulder. Most of the evidence is EMG from small groups.

Thumbs up, forward or down. In 10 competitive bodybuilders, each lifting a weight they could manage 8 times, the side delt worked hardest with the thumbs pointing forward and the palms facing the floor. That beat the same raise with the thumbs pointing up. Thumbs down shifted the work to the rear delt, the upper traps and the triceps. A 90-degree bend in the elbow gave less side delt activity than straight arms.

The "empty can" problem. A raise with the thumbs down is known in rehab as the "empty can", as if you were pouring out a drink. In 22 people with healthy shoulders, the empty can worked the side delt harder than the "full can", with the thumbs up: 77% of maximum against 52%. But in a study of 20 people, the empty can tipped the shoulder blade forward and turned it inward at almost every arm angle measured. The authors wrote that this narrows the space the rotator cuff tendons pass through. They advised the thumbs-up version where that space matters. So keep your palms facing the floor or your thumbs turned slightly up, and skip the thumbs-down version.

Straight out to the side or slightly forward. The plane of your shoulder blade sits about 30 degrees in front of your body, and many coaches cue raising in that plane. In 14 healthy people, raising straight out to the side worked the side delt only slightly more: 5% of its maximum. Within that 30-degree arc, the other shoulder muscles worked much the same. Lift where your shoulders feel best. For most people, that is with the dumbbells slightly in front of the body.

How high. Shoulder height, about 90 degrees, is the usual stopping point. The studies above stopped there, and one defined failure as not reaching it. No study has compared it with lifting higher.

Leaning. A slight forward lean is common coaching that no study has tested. Leaning back to lift usually means the dumbbells are too heavy.

Dumbbell or cable. With a dumbbell, the weight pulls straight down. It is easy with your arm at your side and hardest at shoulder height. That is plain leverage, not a study result. A cable set low can load the bottom of the raise more. In the 2025 study, each person trained one arm with a cable and the other with a dumbbell, 5 sets to failure twice a week. After 8 weeks, both arms grew about the same. The authors had expected the cable to win.

Where the advice differs

Most lateral raise technique is coaching habit. The questions below are where the advice you hear in the gym disagrees.

Common mistakes and how to fix them

Sets, reps and rest for the lateral raise

There is no single right number. The table is a starting point built on the research on lifting in general, plus the one training study of the raise itself.

On Strength Level, a site where lifters log their sets, 3 sets of 10 is the most logged lateral raise workout: 19% of men's and 24% of women's.

What the studies show:

• Muscle grows about as well with light or heavy weights, if the sets go close to failure. Heavy weights build more strength, but few people train the lateral raise for a max.
• More weekly sets bring more muscle, up to a point. A 2026 review of 67 studies found that a set for a helping muscle counts best as half a set. The 2025 raise study counted each shoulder press set as half a set for the side delt.
• With the same weekly sets, training a muscle more often does not add size.
• You do not need to reach failure. On the raise, a failed rep is safe: the dumbbells just stop short of shoulder height. The 2025 study defined failure that way.
• Rest at least a minute. A review of 9 studies found a small gain from resting longer than 60 seconds and little more past 90 seconds.

For longer answers, read how many sets and reps build muscle and how long to rest between sets.

Warm-up sets before lateral raises

When the raise comes after presses, one lighter set of 10 to 12 reps is usually enough. The set is there to find the groove and check that nothing pinches. When the raise comes first in your session, do 2 lighter sets.

None of this has been tested on the raise. In 2 studies of the bench press, the squat and the leg press, a warm-up set at about 80% of the working weight helped the sets that followed more than lighter warm-ups did. A third found that the kind of warm-up made no difference. A review of 31 upper-body warm-up studies found none that tested whether warming up prevents injury. The set counts and rep counts are habit.

How heavy should your lateral raises be?

Lighter than you think. Pick dumbbells you can lift 12 to 15 times with control, without swinging or shrugging, with 2 or 3 reps to spare. Start with the lightest pair that still feels like work, and go up from there.

Published standards for the lateral raise are weak. No sport tests it, no study sets a standard, and StrengthLog has no table for it. The one table we found comes from what gym app users log, with no check on form.

Strength Level builds its dumbbell lateral raise table from 1,211,431 lifts its users logged from 2017 to 2026. After checks for implausible, duplicate or automated entries, 314,512 results remained. It lists one-rep maxes (1RM, the most weight you can lift once) for one dumbbell:

The weight is one dumbbell, and you hold one in each hand. An intermediate woman's 9 kg means a 9 kg dumbbell in each hand. Strength Level counts the handle of an adjustable dumbbell, normally 2 kg (4.4 lb).

The table also scales with body weight. For a 60 kg woman, its levels start at 3, 6, 9, 13 and 17 kg. For an 80 kg man, they start at 5, 10, 16, 25 and 34 kg. These are one-rep maxes, so your sets of 12 to 15 will use much less.

Add reps before you add weight. Dumbbell jumps are large for this lift. Going from 4 kg to 6 kg adds 50% to the weight, far more than a typical jump on a barbell lift. So stay with one pair until every set reaches the top of your rep range, say 15 to 20 reps, with clean form. Then move up and start again near 10 to 12 reps. In the 2025 study, researchers changed the weight in steps of just 0.25 kg. In a gym, a cable stack or small add-on plates can fill the gap. The dumbbell-only plan covers these jumps, and progressive overload the idea behind them.

Under 18? The table is for adults and sets no target for teenagers. Clean reps matter more than any number on it.

Find your lateral raise max

A one-rep max on the lateral raise is not something people test, and you do not need one. The calculator still helps: type the weight of one dumbbell and the reps you did, and it estimates your max with 7 formulas. Sets of 10 reps or fewer give the closest estimate.

Use the number to compare your own sets over time. A swing or a shrug changes the estimate, so keep your form the same. For more detail, open the 1RM calculator.

Swinging, shrugging and your shoulders

The lateral raise uses light weights, so it rarely goes wrong all at once. The common problems are a swing, a shrug and a shoulder position that pinches.

Swinging. A swing from the hips gets the dumbbells moving before your shoulder does, so your side delt does less of the lift. It also jolts the shoulder at the top. If you need a swing to reach shoulder height, the weight is too heavy.

Shrugging. As the side delt tires, many lifters let their shoulders rise towards their ears, and the upper traps take over. Thumbs down made it worse: in 10 bodybuilders, that version worked the upper traps hardest of 5 raises. Pull your shoulders down before each rep and stop at shoulder height.

Arm high and turned in. Thumbs down with the arm near shoulder height tips the shoulder blade into a position that narrows the space for the rotator cuff tendons. The upright row puts your arm in a similar spot. If your shoulder pinches there, change the position before you change anything else.

Up to 36% of the injuries recorded in weight training are at the shoulder. A review linked them in part to poor attention to technique, so take a nagging shoulder seriously early.

When the lateral raise hurts

Pain is a reason to change something, not to push through. Diagnosis and treatment belong to a physiotherapist or a doctor.

• Top or outside of the shoulder near shoulder height: turn your thumbs slightly up, bring the dumbbells a little in front of your body, and stop just below shoulder height. Use lighter dumbbells for a few weeks.
• Neck or top of the traps: use lighter dumbbells, pull your shoulders down before each rep and keep your thumbs out of the thumbs-down position.
• Elbow: keep a slight, steady bend rather than locked arms, and lower the weight.
• Pain that wakes you at night, or an arm you cannot lift, needs a doctor or physio soon.
• Numbness, tingling or weakness down an arm needs a doctor soon.

For lasting pain, read what to do when a lift hurts.

Lateral raise variations and alternatives

In Trackist's exercise library, the dumbbell lateral raise sits in one group with 4 other side-shoulder movements: the cable lateral raise, the machine lateral raise, the leaning cable lateral raise and the upright row. The app's lateral raise page lists them as similar movements. When you swap the raise for one session or for the rest of your plan, the picker puts that group first, starting with those your equipment and joints allow.

How Trackist runs your lateral raises

Trackist is an AI personal trainer for the gym. It writes your plan, and the lateral raise gets this from the app:

• You log the weight of one dumbbell. The weight column on the card says so.
• From your second session of lateral raises, Trackist suggests what to try from the last time you logged them. When every set at your top weight reached the top of the rep range, it adds 2 kg (5 lb) to each dumbbell. Inside the range, it keeps the weight and asks for more reps. There is no suggestion in a deload week.
• When you fall short of the reps, it keeps the weight, takes about 5% off or leaves the call to you, depending on how far short you fell and how hard the sets felt.
• From your second session, it logs a personal record when you beat your heaviest weight, your most reps at a weight or your best estimated max.
• The exercise page shows 4 form cues, the muscles worked and the joint the raise loads: the shoulder. From your second session, it adds a chart of your estimated one-rep max.
• When your shoulder hurts on lateral raises, you report it and rate it from 1 to 5. The library has no side-shoulder exercise that leaves the shoulder out. Trackist picks a replacement from the exercises your profile still allows, or lets you pick one. Your profile remembers that lifting your arms up hurts, so later plans leave out overhead presses, lateral and front raises and upright rows. Bench presses and rows stay.
• Lateral raises do not count towards your Strength Score, which Trackist works out from squats, hip hinges, presses and pulls.