3 key mistakes with standing crossings with pulleys

Bad training habits are difficult to break especially if you are not aware of them. Of course, it cannot always lead to injury, but certainly these mistakes can make movements less effective . I particularly see the same mistakes all the time with pulley crossover, a very simple type of exercise to train the chest.

Be honest: Are you guilty of any of these three most common pulley crossover mistakes? If so, don’t worry because I’m going to provide you with a remedy for each of them. So you can be on top of what you need to do next time you do this cable exercise to train your chest.

Key errors with standing crossings with pulleys

1. Arm opening / closing

All the movements you do in chest exercises have only one thing in common: The elbows should be fixed in a slightly inclined position during the entire movement of the exercise. Take into account that the degree of curvature in the elbows does not vary in the opening and closing during the repetition, it must remain in the same position during the movement of the exercise, giving rise to a great movement in the shape of an arc as if you were hugging a barrel or tree.

One of the main mistakes we make when training the chest with the openings is keeping the arms too rigid, since in this way we think that the work is much more intense and we concentrate much more on the chest, when it is not. What happens when we have our arms outstretched when performing the chest openings is that we divert much of the tension that should be concentrated in the chest to the biceps, which will be the ones that will withstand all the push of the exercise. To avoid this, what we must do is bend the arms slightly at the elbows in order to concentrate much more on the chest.

Solution : Go lighter in weight and rehearse the movement with the pec-deck machine with your arms fixed in a slightly inclined position and do the exercise from this point.

2. You keep your feet together

Crossing is particularly difficult when your feet are together because you are not well positioned to absorb changes in your center of gravity. This additional level of difficulty leads some people to believe that they are doing better, but they are not.

The crosses are for training the chest not for the whole body. Anything that makes movement more difficult, especially when it comes to maintaining balance, is detrimental to your ability to perform quality reps and feel good for the muscle contraction.

Solution : Stagger your posture with your legs slightly apart so that you can feel in a stable position and can focus on what is happening with your chest.

3. You don’t use multiple angles to do the exercise

One of the great things about the crossover cable is that it is not fixed in one position on the pulley. By moving the pulleys to any position from high to low and changing the angle of the torso inclination we will be working different beams of the pectoral. At the top it will favor the lower part of the chest, while the crosses from a lower part will favor the upper part of the chest. Doing repetitions from the middle will work the central part

Solution : Mix a little! Various angles between various high points, low points, and last in the middle.