Decline Dumbbell Fly's

🎯 Chest🏋️ Dumbbell, BenchIsolationShoulders (2°)

How to do the decline dumbbell fly's

  1. Lie on a decline bench with your head lower than your body and your feet firmly on the ground.
  2. With dumbbells together above your shoulders and your arms straight out above you as your starting position.
  3. Keeping your arms straight and with a slight bend in your elbows lower the dumbbells down towards the floor in an arc, up until just above your shoulders.
  4. Return to the starting position in a slow controlled manner.
  5. Repeat.

Muscles worked

The prime mover is the pectoralis major, which drives the upper arm forward and across the body.

Even with a single joint doing the moving, the muscle is not working alone — the deltoids stabilise the shoulder and add force at the top of the range.

Every exercise for:ChestShoulders

How this movement works

Everything happens at one joint. That gives you direct control over where the tension sits; the trade-off is that the muscle gets no help, so the load that feels hard here is a fraction of what a multi-joint version of the pattern would take. Slow, complete repetitions beat heavy ones.

It is filed under strength: produce force against resistance for a countable number of repetitions, and progress the resistance over time.

What you need

Dumbbells let each side work on its own, surfacing a strength difference between limbs that a barbell would quietly cover for, and leaving the wrist free to rotate through the movement.

A bench fixes the torso angle and gives you something to drive against, which is what lets the load go up without your position wandering.

Every exercise using:DumbbellBench

These train the chest too, using equipment this one does not:

Related exercises

Illustration: Everkinetic — CC BY-SA 4.0 — license. Modified versions are shared under the same license. Full attribution →

ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.