maratoolReverse Flyes With External Rotation
How to do the reverse flyes with external rotation
- To begin, lie down on an incline bench set at a 30-degree angle with the chest and stomach pressing against the incline.
- Have the dumbbells in each hand with the palms facing down to the floor. Your arms should be in front of you so that they are perpendicular to the angle of the bench. Tip: Your elbows should have a slight bend. The legs should be stationary while applying pressure with the ball of your toes (your heels should not be touching the floor). This is the starting position.
- Maintaining the slight bend of the elbows, move the weights out and away from each other in an arc motion while exhaling.
- As you lift the weight, your wrist should externally rotate by 90-degrees so that you go from a palms down (pronated) grip to a palms facing each other (neutral) grip. Tip: Try to squeeze your shoulder blades together to get the best results from this exercise.
- The arms should be elevated until they are level with the head.
- Feel the contraction and slowly lower the weights back down to the starting position while inhaling.
- Repeat for the recommended amount of repetitions.
Muscles worked
The prime movers are the deltoids, which raise and rotate the upper arm at the shoulder joint.
Every exercise for:Shoulders
How this movement works
One joint changes angle and the resistance travels toward you along a single arc. Nothing is positioned to help, so tension stays where you aimed it and the usable load drops sharply against a multi-joint pull for the same muscle. Protect the range of motion; buying weight by shortening the arc defeats the point.
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.
Every exercise using:Dumbbell
These train the shoulders too, using equipment this one does not:
- Reverse Machine Flyesmachine
- Seated Cable Shoulder Presscable
- Seated Front Deltoidbody only
- Seated Military Pressbarbell + bench
- Shoulder Press - With Bandsband
Difficulty
Listed at intermediate level. It assumes you already own the underlying pattern and can hold position under load — if the position breaks before the target muscle tires, drop back to a beginner variation until it does not.
Of the 141 shoulders exercises in this database, 46 are listed at intermediate level.
Photos: free-exercise-db — public domain (Unlicense) Full attribution →
ⓘ Informational only — not a substitute for professional fitness or medical advice.