I’m doing one armed rows with the heaviest dumbells in my gym (120 pounds), but I can only do reverse flies with the 65 pound dumbbells.
Does the collective mind think it would be more effective for me to do one armed rows for reps or stop doing them in favor of increasing weight on the reverse flies? I’m leaning towards the reserve flies.
Unless I’m misunderstanding the exercises you’re referring to by these names, they work very different muscle groups, and thus are not interchangeable.
I’m pretty sure I know what you mean by one-arm rows, so can you describe the movement involved in ‘reverse flies’?
A reverse fly is when you lean forwards with a dumbbell in each hand and use your back muscles to make the fly motion. The biceps shouldn’t be doing any more work than needed to keep the arms straightened out.
As described, the movement consists of scapular retraction, which works the middle aspect of the trapezius muscle along with the rhomboids. Unlike the one-arm row, the lat is not involved. So as I said before, this exercise and one-arm DB rows are not interchangeable.
This is true if the scapula is maintained in a protracted (ie, rounded forward) position. If (as per the OP) the primary movement is with the back muscles, the rear delts will be only modestly involved (at best).
As an aside, I doubt if even the strongest IFBB pro could do true (ie, with scapulae protracted) rear-delt flies with 65# DBs.
Yeah I use reverse flies for scap retractionretractio as a superset with shrugs or t bar rows
Also I can row 150s for 10 to 20 depending on the order of the day
Okay, thanks guys. I’ll do some research into these reverse flies to see if I’m doing them wrong because I haven’t heard of some of these details before. I always just leaned over, kept my lower back as still as possible so it wouldn’t help, and squeezed my upper back to bring my shoulder blades together as much as they could.
There is a station at my gym where you rest your upper body on a pad and load it with weights for rows. It has two grips, one to imitate a two handed dumbbell row and one to be a barbell row, and I max out around 200 pounds either way, not including the odd bar with an unknown weight. Now that I think about it, a t-bar would be a fair description for it.