Lats under constant cable tension.
Drive your elbows toward your hips, don't just pull with your biceps.
The pulldown is the classic seated lat builder, a wide grip overhead and elbows driving down toward your hips sweep your lats through their full range, with your biceps assisting the pull. The cable resists smoothly in both directions, so the slow return to the overhead stretch is as productive as the pull itself. It earns its place as the most scalable vertical pull in the gym, loadable for anyone from first session to advanced, and the standard road toward pull-ups.
Massively. Same movement pattern with an adjustable load, so build strength at progressively heavier weights and mix in slow negatives on a bar, the two meet in the middle.
Just outside shoulder width is the sweet spot for most people, wide enough to load the lats, close enough to pull through a full range. Extreme wide grips shorten the range more than they grow your back.
A slight fixed lean is fine, it lines the bar up with your upper chest. What you don't want is rocking backward each rep to heave the weight down, if your torso is moving more than the bar, lighten the stack.
