What Are the Benefits of Decline Fly Exercises?

Even the best workouts can get stale, and worse, your body often gets bored with your exercises before your mind does. Rather than ditching your exercise plan entirely for completely new routines, often all you need to do is take a different angle on the same routine. Your body adjusts to an exercise in roughly four to six weeks of steady practice. If you’re doing chest flies, this means you’ll hit a plateau before you’ve made any significant gains. Changing it up with decline flies offers several important benefits for your upper-body workouts.

  1. Compressed Motion

    • Lying at a declined angle, specifically between 45 and 50 degrees, alters the way your arms move during each of the two phases of motion in a chest fly. Rather than your arms and torso forming a perpendicular 90-degree angle, the decline fly positions your arms at a 45-degree angle to your torso. This motion shortens the range from top to bottom of the lift. This shorter range helps you control the weight as you lift and helps strengthen the pectorals, triceps, deltoids and core stabilizer muscles.

    Lower Pectoral Engagement

    • The compressed angle places the weight directly over the lower pectorals, which forces them to engage more intensely in the lift phase to bring the dumbbells up and together, and during the control phase as you fight gravity to lower them back down. The lower strip of the pectoral muscles are difficult to activate, and typically only presses and flies performed from the declined position successfully work that portion of the pectorals. Developing mass and strength in the lower pectorals improves breathing, tones the area between the abs and the chest, and improves the performance of other upper-body exercises.

    Heavier Weight

    • After you’ve adjusted to the form of a decline fly, you’ll notice that you can typically lift heavier dumbbells from that position than you can from the flat or inclined position. Again, the reason for this is the shorter range of motion. The weight moves in a path that is much closer to your center of gravity compared to standard or incline flies, giving you more control over that weight. Improved control quickly leads to lifting more weight. Despite the ability to handle heavier weight, always use a spotter for any fly or press exercise to prevent injury.

    Work Stabilizers

    • The form of the decline fly also engages your core abdominal and oblique muscles to provide stability during both the lift and control phases of the exercise. This engagement, even though it consists of only basic flexion, still improves the endurance and strength of those muscles with repeated practice. Although you won’t develop mass or achieve significant definition with decline flies, the improved strength and endurance will improve your overall health and level of fitness.