What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today we’re talking about the best exercise you could do for your triceps.
The catch is, as we’ve done this entire series, we’re restricting our selections
to those you can do with just this.
Dumbbells.
Look, we’re not talking sacrifices here because the gains you can make with dumbbells
are just as good as anything else if you choose the right exercises.
With that being said; what type of gains are we talking about?
There are a lot of things we could be training for.
So, I want to give you guys the best selections for developing strength.
Power.
Hypertrophy with eccentric stress as the overload.
A metabolic exercise combination to drive hypertrophy as well.
A total body combination which, yeah, they do exist when it comes to triceps.
The corrective exercises, since I can never completely separate the physical therapist
from the strength coach.
And finally, our miscellaneous exercise, which means something that doesn’t really fit
cleanly into another category.
In this case, when it comes to the triceps, an exercise that allows the maximum shortening,
or maximum contraction of the triceps.
There aren’t that many when it comes to dumbbells.
You guys ready?
We’re going to break them down here category by category.
We kick this one off with the category of strength.
When it comes to building strength, you want to look for the exercises that allow you to
load up with as much weight as possible, as often as possible.
So, you have to have some capacity in the lift that you’re doing.
In the case of the triceps, if I had access to a barbell, I’d run right over to perform
the close grip bench-press because we know that’s the heavy hitter.
But we also have a secondary one.
One that sort of ties.
That is the upright dip.
Simply changing the orientation of your body for more oriented forward, which would hit
more of the chest as a vertical pushup.
To one that’s more upright, placing more of a demand on the elbows, which will impact
the triceps and make that another heavy hitter.
Especially because we know we can weight the exercise.
So, let’s start in reverse.
If we chose the weighted exercise, we could easily make this a dumbbell swap out because
we don’t have to sacrifice the weight.
As a matter of fact, instead of just using plates you just strap a dumbbell up, like
I’m showing you here.
You could even do the equivalent weight and there’s no drop off.
You can get all the gains from this exercise that you would with normally loading it with
plates.
The fact is, there are a couple of things you want to focus on, not just staying more
upright as you can see here.
Placing more of the stress on the triceps, but I also like to finish by opening my hands
and finishing through extension at the wrist to take the forearms out of it, placing more
of that stress on the triceps.
But we go back to the barbell close grip bench-press.
Now, if you guys haven’t already watched the chest edition in this series, you’re
going to want to see that because a similar selection was made.
We had to decide whether or not it was just as good to go to a dumbbell version of the
bench-press, to take the barbell out of it.
In that case, it wasn’t so good because of the high demand of stability on the shoulders
when you make that drop off.
I made the point that 300lb bench-pressers do not become 350lb dumbbell pressers.
But when it comes to the close grip bench-press, the interesting thing is there is a lot less
of a significance in the trade off because of the positioning of the elbows and what
it mainly does to the shoulders.
When the elbows are out here the stability demands on the shoulders are much greater
than they are when the elbows come down and in for the close grip setup.
In fact, it’s one-and-a-half times less torque and stress on the shoulders and the
muscles around the shoulder girdle to support that.
So you’ll find that when you go to make the swap to the dumbbells you don’t have
to sacrifice very much weight at all, which continues to make this a viable exercise selection
when you’re trying to build strength without trying to use light weights to accomplish
that goal.
Guys, you have two options here.
I’m going to keep them tied.
You pick.
Next up we move onto power.
As we’ve discussed here before, when you’re training for power it’s not just about trying
to use exercises that allow you to move some weight, but more importantly, to move them
quickly.
There’s a velocity component here.
So, you want to be explosive when you perform the exercise.
In that case, my best selection here is the dumbbell JM press.
This is a modification of an exercise created by JM Blakely, where we traditionally use
a barbell.
But again, I don’t feel there’s a significant drop off in doing it this way.
The goal here is that we want to try and be explosive.
We want to move this weight with some speed.
So, we select the weight that’s heavy enough, but still easily commanded for us to move
in space.
That initiation of the movement driven by the elbows – actually, the shoulder joint
itself – is allowing an object in motion to stay in motion.
We’re getting the inertia overcome by the movement of the elbows, not necessarily by
the triceps.
But once we get going the triceps can mechanically take advantage and kick in, really accelerating
that weight.
But I have another option, too.
I have two ties to start off this video.
The fact is, as I’ve pointed out in other videos, ideally when you’re trying to train
for power, if you can explode your body or the weight through the concentric with no
deceleration component – because even in the JM press, at some point you’re decelerating
the dumbbells as they reach full extension to protect the elbows.
We wouldn’t have to do that if we setup here like this in a bodyweight, plyo diamond
cutter pushup.
The idea here is, there is no limitation.
You’re pushing concentrically through the ground, as explosively as possible, and the
only thing that would stop you is the roof.
And I don’t think you’re going to be able to push off the ground that hard to get there.
As always with power here, you want to train sub-fatigue.
So, take a series of repetitions here and stop about three or four reps short and the
same thing would happen, and apply, with the JM press.
We move on now to hypertrophy.
While we know that strengthening your muscles is a great way to create gains, we also know
those gains can potentially dry up because progressively overloading an exercise can
hit a wall rather quickly.
So, you need some other weapons in your arsenal.
One of the best ways to do this is with eccentric overload of the muscle you’re trying to
grow.
We can do that great here with the lying dumbbell tricep extension.
This is one of my favorite exercises.
Period.
Why?
Because we can get enormous stretch on the triceps because of the positioning of the
exercise.
I’m able to lay down and get my arms up and over my head.
Why is that so significant?
Because we can place the stretch on the largest portion of the triceps – that being the
longhead – in the bottom portion of this exercise.
Don’t make the mistake that a lot of people do.
They bring the dumbbells all the way up until their arms are straight up over their body.
You lose a lot of tension applied to the triceps by doing that.
Always keep them slightly angled backward throughout the entire exercise.
But here’s where it gets even better.
When you reach failure, we know another way to illicit hypertrophy and muscle gain is
to train through failure.
Increase the intensity of your work.
Go until you can’t do anymore of reps of the lying extension concentrically and now
just drop the elbows, and then flare them out to your side to position yourself, really,
at the beginning of a dumbbell bench-press.
Now we can call on the chest and shoulders to help us get those dumbbells back up to
the top.
Then eccentrically control the weight on the way down.
You’re looking to perform as many eccentric only reps as possible and the only way you’re
going to be able to get these dumbbells back to the top is by calling on and utilizing
the help of those other muscles.
While we know that eccentric and progressive overload are two ways to build muscle, we
always know we have a third.
That option is one that utilizes a lot less weight.
As a matter of fact, it could be using just your bodyweight, as it is in this example.
This is our combination of our floor dip into our close grip dumbbell pushup.
Now, the dumbbells are props in this case.
They’re allowing us to maintain a neutral risk positioning while we perform the first
exercise in this combination, which is a floor dip.
The most important part of this exercise is that we’re getting our arm back behind our
body to allow for a full contraction of the longhead of the triceps.
Perform 10 reps of this and immediately jump our body through to a close grip dumbbell
pushup.
Again, the risk positioning is what’s key here, and being afforded to us by the use
of the dumbbells.
Then we do another 10 repetitions here.
Now we hop our body through and keep going down.
This is the descending ladder.
Ideally, we’re going 9, 8, 7, 6, all the way down.
But if fatigue is cutting you that short, to the point where you can’t do anything
anymore, you have two options.
Number one: you can go and perform them in even numbers only.
10, 8, 6, 4, 2; or ideally, you’ll just mechanically lighten the exercise by dropping
down to your knees in the pushups or placing your knees in a bent position with your feet
flat on the floor to perform the dip.
The idea is, metabolically, in order to achieve what you’re trying to achieve you have to
be willing to go and fight through every, single repetition once the burn starts.
It’s not about just getting to that burn.
If you want to achieve the gains from metabolically stressed exercises you need to be able to
push through that burn as long and as hard as possible.
This combination will allow you to do just that.
Moving on now, we have our total body exercise for our triceps.
It probably sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s true.
We have a way that we can train our entire body and make the triceps be a driver of the
movement.
That’s with this overhead extension thruster.
Now, you’ve probably tried the traditional thruster before and you know that this exercise,
while incorporating a heavy dose of the lower body, is being driven at the top of the movement
by the strength and power of the shoulders.
But we can extend the arms up overhead in a different way.
We can let the triceps be the driver by getting our elbows out in front of our body.
The additional benefit that comes from this exercise is going to demand proper thoracic
extension.
Just like it would at the top of an overhead dumbbell squat.
So, you’re getting an additional benefit here that can fall more into the corrective,
but I’ve got an exercise selected for that as well.
Speaking of that corrective, we need to know that the tricep doesn’t just do this.
It doesn’t just extend the elbow.
As a matter of fact, our appreciation for how significant this muscle is will grow as
soon as we know that it has an attachment that goes across the shoulder, onto the scapula
itself, which is the longhead.
It’s the largest component of the tricep muscle.
Why is that significant?
Because it opens up a whole new world of exercises that we can do to help it perform better at
the job of stabilizing that scapula or getting your arm back into extension behind your body.
So, what we have here is the dumbbell devil.
It might ring a bell because you’ve probably heard me talk about an exercise called the
Angels and Devils.
We know that the angel comes all the way up to the top, but we don’t need to do that
if we’re really trying to focus the intent of this movement on the triceps.
We only need to go about halfway.
You can see me lying down on my belly here and getting the dumbbells of the floor.
For some people that might be really, really difficult alone.
Just getting that isolate extension behind the body, getting that arm lifted up.
But you won’t be able to handle much weight here at all if you don’t learn to incorporate
the other muscles that attach to the shoulder blade and have actions on it.
Therefore, integrating muscles that prefer to work together.
It’s what we always try to do here when we can.
We can do that with this devil exercise.
We get the rhomboids to participate.
We get the rotator cuff to externally rotate the shoulder, to get into position, to get
those shoulders off the mat, and to keep them off as we go through this arc.
Again, you won’t be able to use the heavy weight here, but that’s not the purpose.
This is a corrective exercise meant to integrate the triceps with those other surrounding muscles
of the shoulder girdle for an all-important purpose and, often times, one that’s underutilized.
Last, we wrap up our selection here with our miscellaneous category.
Specifically, what we’re trying to achieve that maybe we didn’t achieve as much in
the other selections.
That is getting full extension and contraction.
Maximum shortening of the triceps.
You might be thinking to yourself “How did we not do that?”
Well, any of the exercises that end with your arms out in front of your body are not doing
that.
The only way to achieve this is by getting that arm, as we just talked about, back behind
your body into extension to get full shortening of the longhead of the triceps.
Here’s an exercise that gets kicked to the curb far too often.
And it’s one of my favorite ways of doing this; the dumbbell tricep kickback.
The most important thing you can do is establish your arm in the beginning of the movement
back behind your body.
Then try to fight and keep it there on every, single repetition.
Look, I know as you start to fatigue those arms are going to start to drift down, and
down, and down, and want to start working their way toward the front of your body.
But at that point, you’re going to lose one of the main benefits of what we’re trying
to achieve here.
Similar to getting full adduction of the chest by crossing midline, you’ve got to keep
that arm up as high as possible.
It might mean using lighter weights.
That’s okay.
We’re generally not that strong in that finished position anyway.
But it doesn’t mean we should ignore it.
You want to find an option and a way to do that.
This is my favorite way, and the best way to do it.
There you have it, guys.
My best dumbbell exercises when it comes to developing your triceps.
Remember, it’s not always about just trying to build strength or just trying to build
size.
It depends upon what you’re trying to train for that will dictate the exercise selections
you choose.
That same level of applying science to the selection we do is what we do in all our programs.
If you haven’t already done so, head to ATHLEANX.com right now and get the program
that best matches up to your current goals.
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Let me know what you want me to cover and I will do my best to do that for you guys
in the days and weeks ahead.
All right.
See you soon.