How to Build Your Chest with Flys

Some form of Chest Flys are a legit chest exercise. I’ll talk you through how you can maximise them at the video at the bottom of this page.

Realistically though they are just a variation of a standard chest press without the effect of the triceps…

Take the image below.

The only difference between a cable fly and cable chest press is the amount of bend in my elbow. If I bend my elbow and bring my hands inward keeping my upper arm in the same position I’m now performing a standard chest press.

Most people think they need to ‘stretch’ the chest out during flys by dropping the hands as low & as wide as possible. From what I’ve outlined in the paragraph above though you should now be able to see that the actual chest muscle hasn’t been stretched more. The upper arm which is where the pec muscle attaches to is in the same place so no or minimal extra stretch has actually been added by dropping the hands out.

There’s no extra ‘stretch’ here so to speak. The feeling of a stretch comes from another muscle that has no effect on chest size or strength and can actually be quite painful when loaded in this way.

So going really wide & deep on your flys isn’t required & could even be more painful. So we should avoid flys right..? Wrong!

Like I mentioned flys are great as they isolate the chest as opposed to a chest press where the triceps are recruited as well. Then we have the cherry on the cake which I highlight in the video.

The couple of variations I add here help improve the contraction of the chest especially the inner chest area. When you watch the video you can mimic the movement just with you arms & no weight & you should be able to feel exactly what I’m saying.

Plus I mainly prefer cable variations as tension can be kept through out the movement as opposed to gravity limiting the contraction of the muscle at stages of DB pec flys.

Let me know what you think.

PS

The video below is a cut from one of the session run through videos for the #TeamHUD Training, Nutrition & Motivation Group I run. You can get an example upperbody session at THIS LINK.