reckonerCable fly
Two cables set at chest height, a handle in each hand, and your arms swept together along a level arc until your hands meet in front of your breastbone. It is the straight across version of cable work for the chest, and the setup is the whole difference from a crossover: the pulleys stay level with your chest, so your arms travel across your body rather than down it.
Pulleys at chest height, arms sweep level.
- 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 both pulleys at chest height
Line the pulleys up with the middle of your chest and take a handle in each hand. That height is what makes this a fly. Set them high and the cables pull your arms down and across, which is a cable crossover, a different movement with its own page.
Step out and take the slack out
One step forward from the frame, so the stacks have already lifted before the first rep. Split your feet for balance and keep your trunk upright rather than leaning over. Arms out to the sides, a small bend at each elbow.
Sweep the hands together, level
Bring your hands around in front of you along a flat arc, as if you were closing your arms around something wide, until they meet in front of your breastbone. They meet and stop. They do not cross, and they do not drift down toward your hips. Moving the arm straight across the body is the action that leans on the middle of the chest1.
Open under control, to the line of your chest
Let the handles travel back out until your hands are level with your chest, then begin the next rep. The elbow angle you set at the start is the elbow angle you finish with.
What goes wrong
Letting the hands sink
As the set gets hard, the hands start finishing lower and lower until the fly has quietly become a crossover. Keep them at chest height all the way in. If you cannot, the stack is too heavy for this set.
Turning it into a press
The elbows bend on the way out and straighten on the way in, and your triceps take over the set. It feels stronger because it is a different exercise. Fix the elbow angle and let the shoulder be the only joint that moves.
Opening too far behind you
A cable keeps pulling hardest where your arms are widest. In a lab comparison, cable chest work put larger peak loads on the shoulder than a bench press did, and the peak came early in the rep, at the open end2. Stop when your hands reach the line of your chest. The inches behind it cost the shoulder more than they give the chest.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 kg | Load up 10 kg → 12.5 kgYou hit the top of the range at RPE 7, so the bar goes up 2.5 kg to 12.5 kg. The weight went up, so the reps come down to eight. You are now working 8 to 12. 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
Is a cable fly the same as a cable crossover?
No, and Reckoner keeps them as two movements. On a crossover the pulleys are set high and your arms sweep down and across your body; on a fly they sit at chest height and your arms move level. Pulling the arm down from a raised position leans on the lowest part of the chest, while moving it straight across leans on the middle1. They share a swap group, so either can stand in for the other when a station is taken.
Can I use this instead of pressing?
Not as a replacement. In a direct comparison the barbell bench press produced higher chest activation than a dumbbell fly through most of the lift3. A fly earns its place beside a press, not in front of one.
How does Reckoner add weight to a cable fly?
In the step your cable stack actually has, rather than a percentage that lands between two pins. It asks what your own gym holds for this movement, and the step it uses is in the fact block at the top of this 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
- Paton and Brown, Journal of Electromyography and Kinesiology, 1994. An electromyographic analysis of functional differentiation in human pectoralis major muscle that moving the arm straight across the body drew on the middle segments of the pectoralis major whatever the height of the arm, while extending a raised arm drew on the lowest segments; a small, older study of isometric efforts in eight men, cited from its abstract
- Schütz and colleagues, Sports, 2022. Chest Exercises: Movement and Loading of Shoulder, Elbow and Wrist Joints that the cable pulley exercises produced significantly larger peak moments at the shoulder than the bench press exercises, and that on the cable exercises the peak came in the first phase of the rep
- 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