What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
The fly.
No, not one of my favorite exercises, as I've talked about here many times here on this
channel.
But mostly because of the risk-reward ration.
As someone that trains professional athletes, realizing that the overhead thrower, the quarterback,
a pitcher; anything that's going to potentially injure their shoulder, it's not that great
of an exercise.
If I had better options – and I feel I have better options that can do this.
However, that has led some to question me and say "Jeff, could I do a floor fly?
That would eliminate some of the things that you don’t like about the exercise."
The answer is "yes", and not just that.
There's actually an additional benefit the floor fly will provide that will allow you
to start gaining even more from the exercise.
So let me show you what I'm talking about.
When we talk about the fly itself what is it that I didn't really like about it?
If we're on a bench, unsupported here, when I do the exercise the advice is to keep your
elbows bent.
Not to allow them to straighten out so much, just going to increase the moment arm, and
therefore increase the feel of the weight that you have in your hand.
A 10lb dumbbell held way out here will feel different.
So what we want to do is keep the elbows bent, and then lighten the weight, is what they'll
tell you.
But the problem with that advice is, if you want to build muscle you want to be able to
overload that muscle and essentially, you want to be able to overload it eccentrically.
Negatively.
On the way down because that is going to allow you to do some more of that micro damage to
allow for more muscle growth.
That's not really conducive to doing this exercise this way because unsupported, if
at any point in time you were to fail on the way up without completing the rep, and you
had to dump the weights – which I see a lot of guys do in the gym – you're instantly
compromising the anterior shoulder capsule here.
The AC joint, and potentially the pec, in terms of suffering a pec tear.
So by doing it on the floor, what we're able to do is get in the same position, almost
simulate the same amount of depth because we can arch the low back here this way.
Keep the butt in contact with the ground.
Shoulder blades pinched together.
Chest out.
Keep the elbows bent again, but now we have that pretty decent depth here, but we've got
a bottom point.
We've got a safety net underneath us here that allows us to not – even if we had to
– dump it down without having to risk the injury to the front side of the shoulder,
or the pec itself.
So we can do the fly in this manner and we've actually, now, fixed that.
But what am I talking about?
What's the additional benefit?
Well, if you want to gain more muscle you want to be able to overload and those that
are avoiding the heavier weights because it's not a "good idea" on flies – even on those
that do flies to a degree.
By the way, Arnold Schwarzenegger, this is his favorite exercise.
I get it, but even he tore his pec with the exercise.
So there are certainly risks to it.
So what we do is, with the heavy version, or basically a weight heavier than you would
normally lift because you don’t want to incur an injury on the bench, you could lift
that here now, on the floor because I could do the eccentric overload knowing that I have
this safety net below me here to catch me.
If I can't necessarily press it back up to the top, and I don’t necessarily have all
the strength to do that, I can just shorten that arm by bringing my hands in, press it
up now, and now go back into another eccentric.
So I could do continuous eccentrics here and get a really good overload on the chest, with
the safety still intact of the exercise.
Again, a benefit that the floor provides that the regular bench does not.
So it looks like this continuous motion this way.
I'll go one more.
You're getting this eccentric, horizontal adduction which is one of the key components
of the chest.
Like I said, that dumping of the weight doesn't make my shoulder vulnerable like it would
otherwise.
So guys, I hope you can see the difference here and realize that it’s not just doing
exercises.
It's about doing the exercises that allow you the best benefit while not compromising
your longevity in the gym.
I don’t care.
Maybe you're not an athlete.
There's a lot of people that watch this channel that aren't athletes, but you still want to
be able to stay healthy so you can stay in the gym and train for the long term and continue
to see gains month after month, year after year.
That's what this channel's all about.
In the meantime, if you're looking for a program that puts the science back in strength, takes
into consideration not just the ways to help you build more size and strength, and power,
but in a safe way so you can continue to do this for years on end; then head to ATHLEANX.com
to get our ATHLEANX training program.
In the meantime, if you've found this video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up
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Let me know what you want me to cover on this channel and I'll do my best to do that in
the days and weeks ahead.
All right, guys.
I'll see you soon.