Getting to know Your Body—One muscle at a time
February 25, 2008 by Liz Harper
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The Pectoralis Major muscle is your largest chest muscle. It’s origin is Your clavicle (collar bone) and Sternum (Chest bone) and its insertion point is the humerus (upper arm bone).
The Pectoralis Major is used in Horizontal Flexion, Adduction and Internal Rotation.
The exercises that work this muscle are:
- Pushups
- Bench Press or Chest Press
- Flys
- Pec Deck (exercise No-No)
Pec Deck Exercise - It’s an exercise No - No
This is a machine exercise found in most gyms. You sit in the machine placing your feet in front of you, sometimes on a foot rest that can double as a mechanism of moving the arm pads forward. The arms then are placed behind a pad on each side of your body with the arms in a right angled position with your hands usually level with your eyes.
Not only is this exercise not functional to daily activity, it can also be potentially dangerous.
This is an isolated chest exercise that places the shoulder in the position of dislocation (i.e. abduction and external rotation), one of its least stable positions.
From a functional perspective, the external rotation of the arm also places the insertion of the pectoralis major in an ineffective line of pull between the origin and the insertion, decreasing its potential to develop force around the shoulder joint..
What does that mean? It means that the biggest chest muscle (Pec Major) isn’t working the best or most effective way to generate a good force within the muscle. That means you are wasting your good efforts on an exercise that could be better spent doing something such as: Pushups, or Bench Press etc
Source: AIF Empowering You To Excel
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