Tim’s Tips are brought to you by Tim Rigby, M.A., NSCA-CPT
The pec deck flye is an excellent isolation movement for your shoulder girdle area including your upper pecs. Sit on the apparatus at a height where your upper arms are parallel to the floor, grasp the handles, and draw the pads in toward each other in front of you. The most common mistake here is that people engage their hands far too much, when they should be focusing more on their elbows. Invariably, what happens is that the wrists begin to pronate (turn down), the elbows come flaring outward instead of remaining low, and your back and shoulders start to get involved, instead of keeping the isolation on your pecs.
The simple fix is to “lead with your elbows”. Instead of concentrating on your hands coming together, think more along the lines of drawing your elbows together. In fact, you can actually push the handles with the sides of your hands (or using just your pinky and ring finger in each hand), as long as it’s your elbows which converge to keep the isolation on your pecs. In fact, if you set the weight stack light enough, you could perform this movement exclusively with your elbows – and not even use your hands at all.
So start out slowly and with lighter resistance. Perform multiple sets of high reps to nail down muscle memory and get a better feel for the stimulus placed on your pectoral muscles. This is an excellent exercise to perform right after the compound bench press, since you’re now devoting effort to isolation. You can even perform slow reps, where you employ the principle of time under tension (TUT) and really develop excellent feel that will get your chest pumped super quickly!