Greasing the Groove for Cable Lateral Raises: Does It Build Shoulder Strength or Just Endurance?

I feel like there is a lot going on here, and we need to back up. But to start, I will say, for your goal of losing weight, minimizing fatigue, and generally being healthy, it literally doesn't matter. If you like what you are doing, just keep showing up.

Anyway, I feel like you are mixing up strength training and bodybuilding in a very weird way. My biggest question is simply why you would want to train pure isolated side delt strength. Pavel advocated GtG on big compound lifts, like deads and pull ups, because deadlift and pull up strength translates to real improvements in strength in real life - which is what Pavel primarily cared about. Helping linebackers knock down other linebackers, helping special forces soldiers sprint carring 100lb backpacks, and helping your dad not throw out his back moving a couch. None of this requires isolated side delt work - the side delts help with things like OHP, but they arent the main movers, and there are few movements in real life that mimic a lateral raise.

Meanwhile, Nippard is a bodybuilder, and his priority is making his muscles big so he can win bodybuilding contests. This doesnt mean he isn't strong - but the reason he trains isolated side delt movements isnt to max his deadlift. It is to make his side delts bigger.

Honestly, my biggest thought is that if your goal is general health, fitness, and weight loss, you should just save yourself the time and effort and drop side delt exercises entirely. But then, we could even go a step further and say you could stop going to the gym entirely. For the goal of general health and fitness, you can just play pickup soccer - make friends, have fun, get some fresh air! And stop giving a shit about set and rep schemes for side delts!

But if going to the gym is fun for you and you just like training side delts, then I'd say that you can give it a shot, but I wouldn't expect a sure result. We gain strength in two ways - neuromuscular recruitment, and growth of muscle tissue. Muscle tissue grows when it is pushed close-ish to its physical limit, which is why we usually see more reps used for smaller muscles - with a small muscle like the side delts, 5lbs is a big jump, and doing 2 reps with, say 30lbs might be easy while doing 3 is impossible. But doing reps with 15lbs, we can do 10 or 20 or 30 reps until we find muscular failure. Meanwhile, if you are chasing pure strength, a lot of the gains come from learning alignment of the body, which comes into play less for isolation moves. So hopefully you are also practicing Pavels feed-forward techniques, or else I expect your gains to level off pretty quick.

Not to say you won't see strength or hypertrophy gains with this protocol - just saying that you are n=1 here.

You are overthinking this my dude. And easily done so please don't take that as an insult - many of us do it, especially older beginners. Firstly well done on getting started.

In terms of lat raises, it's a muscle that you can't work too heavy. It's better to do lower weight, more reps and possibly more often rather than low reps, higher weight - this is easier to lead to bad form and injury. You don't want a shoulder injury in your 40s, trust me (he says as he rubs his rotator cuff). If you want higher intensity without increasing weight, try slowing down the movement and increasing the range of motion (cross further in front of your body)

Edit: as I'm assuming you're in a calorie deficit ATM, your main goal is losing body fat whilst maintaining/growing muscle not making PBs - but you probably will as you'll have newbie gains, but that isn't the main goal.

lol, with that goal, i guess it makes sense! Best of luck to you!

I gladly welcome the criticism! I want to get very strong side delts but I want to minimize mental fatigue. I have a tendency to push myself to the extreme because I enjoy the challenge, which is why I take ice baths 2-3 times per month and always on the lookout for new mental or physical challenges. 2 months ago, I knew I needed to dial back my mental fatigue caused by the gym about 80% so I came across the GtG protocol which seemed promising.

My priority is weight loss and I'm struggling with deficits at the moment, but I'm still down 80 pounds from where I was at 2 years ago. I'm doing low-carb with digital timers for salty drinks every 3 hours as that works great for me as long as I stay hydrated and consume plenty of salt. For whatever reason though, I feel like my mind is putting excessive priority to strength gains, which is exacerbated due to my daily gym habit. From July 2024 until November 2025, I would go to the gym 4-6 days per week and mostly do treadmill for 30 minutes at zone-2 pace. I would also do 1-2 working sets each visit to the gym with very little motivation or RPE because treadmill was my main focus and I didn't enjoy any of the exercises except leg press.

Starting later this week, I'll start doing cable lateral raises 2-3 times per week with proper volume of 3-4 sets per session of 8-15 reps with 3 reps in reserve.

[quote]My biggest question is simply why you would want to train pure isolated side delt strength.[/quote]

My biggest motivation is to be able to lift this heavy blue cooler from my passenger seat, over my body, and then to lower it to the ground without it bumping into the armrest. It was the reason why I (incorrectly) focused so heavily on dumbbell shoulder presses and increased my 1-rep max so much this year (a little over 20% in 3-4 months). If you've ever seen the "fly episode" of breaking bad, I'm similarly motivated on this 1 singular endeavor only to come to the slow realization that my cooler-lifting goal is probably more side-delt focused than front delt. 🤦‍♂️

[quote]Honestly, my biggest thought is that if your goal is general health, fitness, and weight loss, you should just save yourself the time and effort and drop side delt exercises entirely.[/quote]

If I had no other life responsibilities, I would honestly spend 4-5 hours daily in the gym. I genuinely enjoy lifting heavy stuff and I never tire of it! However, I have about 2 hours daily I can devote to the gym but my bottleneck is mental fatigue. I obsessively try to optimize my daily habits but have regrettably noticed that gym fatigue negatively impacts all other parts of my life by seemingly depleting my will-power. I'm still experimenting but it seems lat exercises and arm exercises are my best options for minimizing gym fatigue so I wish to embrace those. My glute bridge stuff is about to be dropped. I'm only doing it because I had chronic back pain for 3 years, before getting a 90% improvement last year. I'm trying to get strong glutes to get that last 10% of improvement but I plan to quit doing glute bridges and find better glute exercise.

[quote]But if going to the gym is fun for you and you just like training side delts, then I’d say that you can give it a shot, but I wouldn’t expect a sure result. We gain strength in two ways - neuromuscular recruitment, and growth of muscle tissue. Muscle tissue grows when it is pushed close-ish to its physical limit, which is why we usually see more reps used for smaller muscles - with a small muscle like the side delts, 5lbs is a big jump, and doing 2 reps with, say 30lbs might be easy while doing 3 is impossible. But doing reps with 15lbs, we can do 10 or 20 or 30 reps until we find muscular failure. Meanwhile, if you are chasing pure strength, a lot of the gains come from learning alignment of the body, which comes into play less for isolation moves. So hopefully you are also practicing Pavels feed-forward techniques, or else I expect your gains to level off pretty quick. Not to say you won’t see strength or hypertrophy gains with this protocol - just saying that you are n=1 here[/quote]

Fully agreed and I will look more into Pavel's feed-forward techniques as I'm still new to his stuff. I'm reading his "Simple & Sinister" book for kettlebells because I can do them at ni

I'd recommend just trying for 0-1 RIR, it's what I do on lateral raises (and most lifts) and I'd recommend it, if not for all lifts then at least for the ones where you don't run much risk of injuring yourself near failure. With lateral raise, failure looks like you just can't lift the dumbells or cables very far anymore, and you just put your arms back down. Shouldn't be much of a problem where injury is concerned. It's not like OHP or bench press 0-1 RIR which could be more risky.

Side delts are worth strengthening for anyone IMO. It's definitely a separate goal than weight loss, in fact bodybuilding style lifting / isolation lifts have nearly nothing to do with weight loss per se.