reckonerLow-to-high cable fly
Both pulleys set at the bottom, a handle in each hand, and your arms swept up and together until your hands meet in front of your chin. It is the cable fly turned upward, and the rising path is the whole point of it.
Pulleys low, hands sweep up to chin height.
- 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 the bottom
Put both pulleys at their lowest setting and take a handle in each hand. Low is what makes this a low-to-high fly. At chest height the same station gives you a cable fly, and set high it gives you a cable crossover, and each of those has its own page.
Step forward and set your elbows
Take a step forward from the frame so both weight stacks have lifted before the first rep, with your feet split for balance and your trunk upright. Let your arms hang down by your sides, palms forward, with a soft bend at each elbow. That bend stays the same for the whole set.
Sweep up and together
Bring your hands forward, up and in along an arc until they meet in front of your chin. Raising the arm in front of you is the action that, in an EMG study, drew most on the upper part of the chest muscle1. Your hands meet and stop. They do not keep climbing above your head.
Lower along the same arc
Let the handles travel back down and out the way they came until your hands are beside your hips again, then start the next rep. Control the way down. Letting the stacks pull your arms back is a set that only works half the time.
What goes wrong
Turning it into a front raise
If your hands travel straight up in front of you rather than coming together, the front of your shoulders takes the set. It feels the same because the hands end up in the same place. Start wide at the bottom and let the hands draw in toward each other as they rise.
Bending and straightening the elbows
The elbows bend on the way down and straighten on the way up, and your triceps start doing the lifting. It feels stronger because it is a different exercise. Fix the elbow angle and let the shoulder be the only joint that moves.
Leaning back to finish the rep
As the set gets hard, the trunk tips back to get the hands up to chin height. That moves your body instead of your arms, so the chest does less of the lifting. Stay upright. If you cannot reach chin height without leaning, the stack is too heavy for this set.
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 with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and 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 with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and 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 with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and 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 with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and 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 with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7), so the weight on the cable stack 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
Does a low-to-high cable fly work the upper chest?
It leans that way. Raising the arm in front of you drew most on the upper segments of the chest muscle in a small EMG study, while moving the arm straight across drew on the middle1. That study is older, in eight men, and measured activation rather than growth, so read it as a direction rather than a promise.
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 across the whole lift2. A fly earns its place beside a press, not in front of one.
Will Reckoner put this in my plan?
Only if you choose it. Reckoner never places this movement in a plan by itself, but you can pick it in the movement picker, take it when a swap is offered, or find it by name in search. Once it is in your plan it stays there, and the weight goes up in the step your own cable stack has, which 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. Four of the five have pages so far.
Sources
- Paton and Brown, Journal of Electromyography and Kinesiology, 1994. An electromyographic analysis of functional differentiation in human pectoralis major muscle that shoulder flexion drew on the superior segments of the pectoralis major while horizontal flexion drew on the middle segments; a small, older study of isometric efforts in eight men, cited from its abstract
- 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