Pump up an Sculpt your Pecs... Full Range Flyes

For the first couple of years of my fitness plight I really didn't feel that my chest was developing like I wanted it to.  I did hundreds of pushups both wide hand and close hand.  I did bench press after bench press.  Hundreds of sets on the pec-deck, but still was not see the results I wanted.  I started doing dumbbell flyes as I found in different exercise forums.  I did the incline flyes, the decline flyes and also the flat bench flyes.  I did start noticing a difference in my chest definition, but still not what I was looking for.  One day at the gym I was watching others workout and noticed they too followed the same regime; Incline flyes, flat flyes, decline flyes, etc.  I started to analyze the entire movement of the exercise and this is what I came up with.

We know that the incline flyes concentrate on the upper pectoralis muscles, but who is to say what angle is considered the best incline?  We know that the flat flyes work the entire pectoralis muscle conc on the middle of the pectoralis major.  Well this one was easy flat is flat.  Now we look at the decline flyes which are supposed to be working the lower pecs and pectoralis minor located behind the pectoralis major.  Ok, being an engineer by trade, to me angles are very precise and their measurement should be defined.  But the majority of articles you read dealing with inclination of flyes and the decline angle of flyes are very vague!!!

So let's look at this very analytically, the pectoralis major muscle is a sheet of muscle stretched across the chest bitalerally oritinating from the strenum and inserted on the head of the humerus bone toward the shoulder.  If you want to work this muscle evenly, wouldn't it make sense to work it at different angles, not just three arbitrary angles like most authors claim say 45 deg, 0 deg, and -45 deg?

I let the geek in me get the better of me and decided to try something different.  I decided to make a full range fly exercise regime and so I did.

The gym I attend has all Star Trac equipment including the multi-angle benches.  They have 9 different angles of inclination, it is gradiated from 0 degrees to 90 degrees and 7 gradiations in between.  The bench is pictured below,

I decided I was going to see exactly what difference it would make if I did a complete workout using not the typical 3 angles, but all 9 for the workout.

I started using dumbbells 10 lbs less than I had already been using for my 3 angle approach knowing the angles I was not used to would definitely strain me at first.  I started by doing 1 set of ten reps at each angle, starting at 90 degrees (upright) and working through every angle finishing after 2 sets of 10 reps at 0 dgrees of horizontal with the floor.  I continued this 3 times a week and worked it into my every day workout regime.

I have to say I am very happy with the results and finally I feel my pecs are developing into muscle I can be very proud of.  Here I am after 4 months of this regime and still working hard on it.