Flat Bench Cable Flys

🎯 Chest🏋️ Bench, CableIsolationShoulders (2°)

How to do the flat bench cable flys

  1. <h3> Steps</h3>
  2. Lie on flat bench between two cable towers and your feet firmly on the ground.
  3. Grasp a pulley in each hand with your palms facing up.
  4. With a slight bend in your elbows, squeeze your chest and pull the cables together meeting in the middle of your chest.
  5. Hold for a moment and then slowly lower your hands back to starting position at bench height.
  6. <h3>Tip</h3>
  7. Ensure your back and hips stay in contact with the bench at all times during this exercise.

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

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.

A cable holds tension for the whole range, including the point where a free weight would go slack. Moving the pulley changes the angle the resistance arrives from without changing the movement.

Every exercise using:BenchCable

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.