reckonerCable crossover
The one chest movement whose resistance does not come from the floor. A cable pulls along its own line, so the chest is still working at the point where your hands meet, which is exactly where a dumbbell fly has nothing left to hold up.
Soft elbows, hands meet in front.
- Pattern
- Horizontal push
- Trains
- Chest, front delts
- Kit
- Cable
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 8 to 12 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2.5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Shoulder
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the pulleys and take the slack out
Both pulleys at or a little above shoulder height, a handle in each hand. Step forward until the cables are already pulling before you start. If there is slack at the top of the movement, the first part of every rep is free.
Split the stance and brace
One foot in front of the other, knees soft, ribs pulled down. You are holding a position against something that wants to open your chest, so the trunk has a job from the first rep to the last.
Open with the elbows fixed
Let your arms travel out and back with a small bend at the elbow, and hold that bend. The angle you start with is the angle you finish with. Stop opening when your hands reach the line of your chest.
Bring the hands together and stay there
Draw the handles down and in until they meet in front of you, then hold for a moment before letting them back out. That end position is the reason you picked this movement, and it is the part people rush through.
What goes wrong
Turning it into a press
The elbows start bending on the way out and straightening on the way in, and the triceps quietly take the set over. Fix the elbow angle. If you cannot hold it, the stack is too heavy.
Chasing range behind the body
Opening past the line of your chest puts the shoulder at the end of its own range while it is loaded. The cable already asks more of the shoulder joint than a bench press does1, so those extra inches are the expensive ones.
Starting each rep with the legs
A small dip and a lunge into the first few inches moves the stack without the chest doing much of it. Set the split stance, then let your arms be the only thing that moves.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 15 kg, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3 x 8 at 15 kg | More reps 8 → 9 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 3 x 9 at 15 kg | More reps 9 → 10 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 3 x 10 at 15 kg | More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 11 at 15 kg | More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 12 at 15 kg | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 12 at 15 kg | Load up 15 kg → 17.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 17.5 kg and reps reset to eight. The lighter week is over, so this is back to three sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
Can I use this instead of pressing?
Not as a replacement. Reckoner files this and the dumbbell fly in one swap group, and in a direct comparison the barbell bench press produced higher chest activation than the dumbbell fly through most of the lift2. It earns its place beside a press, not in front of one.
Should the handles cross over at the front?
Either works. Crossing takes the hands a little further through the movement, and stopping when they touch is easier to repeat exactly. Repeatable is what makes this week comparable with last week, so pick one and keep it.
How does Reckoner add weight to a cable stack?
In the step that stack actually has, which is not the same step as a barbell. It asks each movement what its own gym holds rather than adding a percentage that lands between two pins, and this one's step is in the fact block at the top of the page.
Similar movements
Reckoner eases the load first when this lift stalls, and offers one of these only if it stalls again after that. A lift already as light as your kit goes has no load left to ease, so the offer comes straight away. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Schütz and colleagues, Sports, 2022. Chest Exercises: Movement and Loading of Shoulder, Elbow and Wrist Joints that the cable pulley exercises produced significantly larger absolute moments at the shoulder than the bench press exercises, and that the crossover in particular loaded the joints in a more variable pattern
- Solstad and colleagues, Journal of Sports Science and Medicine, 2020. A Comparison of Muscle Activation between Barbell Bench Press and Dumbbell Flyes in Resistance-Trained Males higher pectoralis major activation in the barbell bench press than in the dumbbell fly across the whole movement and most of its phases