I’ve haven’t seen this exercise before, but I did it today and it felt great.
You’re in between two cable stacks with a decent weight, and you do a neutral grip press. As you can imagine, you get the bench press effect plus the flye effect, ie, the pec is worked in both directions at once. I superset by walking now backwards a few steps and rowing, which again, seems to catch the various muscles involved in at least a couple of planes.
Like I said, it felt great, but I’d be interested in what those who know more might have to say.
Sounds like the standing version of the low cable press CW mentions in his chest specialisation workout, and it probably works for the same reason, the cables are trying to pull your arms apart, which places more strain on your chest than a normal vertical bench press would do.
In the past I have experimented with many chest/pectoral movements done with one arm at a time including one arm bench press, one arm flyes, one arm cable pec work, etc. The reasons for this are (1) safety (much easier to get one dumbell into position than trying to jockey two heavy db’s into position (2) I have a cable unit, but not two cable units in my home gym and (3)the effect that these movements have on the midsection-when doing dumbell and incline dumbell presses or db flyes, you have to really “fight” to stay flat on the bench and you really feel it in the midsection.
any thoughts on this-it seemed to be effective at least as an adjunct exercise-anyone tried anything similar?
I occasionally do something similar to that, ie suspended pushups, but with the straps spread wide apart so that you resist the outward pull at the same time as you push. I seem to recall one of the contributing writers (CW?) talk about DB bench pressing with low cables strapped to the forearm to get a similar effect? I know that sounds strange, so I could be wrong. But the wide suspended pushups are good.
Keith, I think Dan John talks about 1 arm bench press getting you “weird strong” (going by memory, but I think that was the phrase he used) in an article or something. Perhaps ask him. How did you find it worked for you - effective?