So your triceps just aren't growing, huh? Don't worry about it because I'm going to show you
here today that if you focus more of our efforts right here on the largest area of your triceps,
and we choose the right exercises to do that, your triceps will grow, I guarantee it. What's up,
guys? Jeff Cavaliere. Athleanx.com. So I get it ,fi your arms aren't growing, and those triceps
just don't seem to be responding, it can be really frustrating. So today I put together
a video that's going to show you exactly what to do for even the most frustrating situations
when those triceps just won't grow anymore. And the thing about it is, you're probably already
doing a lot of the things right. Right, you're doing closed grip bench pressing to really focus
on the triceps more, you're doing push-ups, you're doing all the things you've been told. But there's
an old saying that says you're stepping over dollars for dimes. And when it comes to tricep
anatomy here, you might be doing that. You see, because if you look at the outside of the arm,
we're talking about the lateral and the medial head of the triceps, which doesn't supply nearly
the size contributions as I spin around here that the long head does. This is where the
meat of the triceps is, and this is where if you focus your efforts you're going to
get those arms to be a hell of a lot bigger. Now how do you do this? We can hit that panic button
if need be and take exercises that are already targeting the long head and make them even more
effective by tapping into some techniques to do that. So that being said, guys, I want to
cover them for you one by one and help you to get much more out of your tricep training here
to insure that you're not lacking anymore when it comes to size coming out of those short sleeves.
So the first thing that will help a lot is if you actually have a quick little understanding
of the triceps. Right, and to keep it simple, three heads of the triceps: lateral, medial,
and the long head. And we talked about how the lateral and the medial are the ones that are most
responsible for just straightening out the elbow, right? Because that's all they do they just cross
the elbow. And when we do great exercises, like the bench press or the closed grip bench press,
that's the function that we're getting there. So even though you're using a lot of weight and
doing a good compound lift, the triceps may not be growing to their full capacity. Why? Because
they're not tapping into that large head, the long head of the triceps. To do that,
you understand that long head crosses the shoulder joint and attaches to the shoulder blade. So that
means in order to get that to respond best to your training, you need to do something with
your shoulder. You either need to get it way up to apply a better stretch to that long head, or
you need to figure out a way to get it back behind your body to supply a better full contraction of
that long head. And when looking at an exercise like this, it is the line tricep extension. And
I've shown you guys in the past how this is such a good exercise for giving you the ability to get
that arm back up over your head more. Right, to apply a better stretch to the tricep. But what
about if that's not even working? What if you need to get more out of it? What if you need to
break that glass and hit the panic button? What would you do? You do what I'm showing you over
here. What I'm doing here is I'm simply going for a better stretch of the long head. And there's a
big difference. This is done properly. Both of these are done well. Because, as you see, right
here even at the top, we talked about in the past how the angle is super important. You got to be
angled back from vertical. Right, if you bring it all the way up to the top to a vertical position,
you're going to lose the tension on the triceps even momentarily, or a lot of the tension on the
triceps momentarily, that you can keep on there by keeping your arm angled back. They're both doing
this well. Okay, but more importantly, if you let it play out, here you can see that at the bottom
right about here the difference here even in how much of my face you can see is substantial. So you
can see a lot more of me here because my arm is a lot more parallel to the ground versus angled
here. That little extra stretch on the triceps is going to be that extra kick that you need to
get a better contraction and a better recruitment of muscles fibers in the triceps that are dormant
right now. That once you start to do this, you're going to get them to grow a lot faster. All right,
so the next change I want you to make is this one right here. We talk about the good exercises that
hit the long head. Anything that gets that arm up over head, this is another option,
this is the tricep push away. But there's something you can do here that's going to
make this even more effective, and it's this right here. And for two reasons it's going to get more
effective. If we stop in this position right here we could look at the amount of stretch that
we have going on in the triceps. When we do it in this more traditional way, we've got that stretch,
and then we've got that stretch. Much more ability to get those arms up overhead to get more of that
stretch on the long head to get better recruitment to contribute to every single repetition that you
do. But it goes beyond that. If we go a little bit further when we watch how this thing plays out,
we can see that also at the end right there, there's a difference in the line of force and the
application of this cable and the forces targeting at your triceps. We talked about in the past that
to get the best contraction or the best amount of tension on a muscle, you want that line of force
to be perpendicular to the part that's moving or the muscle that's working here. And in this case,
when looking at the triceps, you can see though even though it's going off the side there,
that we're not talking about a perpendicular force here. We're talking about one that's
angled at this angle here. But when I get my arms upright and I stand more upright, you could
see that that angle becomes much more steep. Not perpendicular, of course, not perfect, but again,
much better than we are here. So for both of those reasons, if you were just to stand a little bit
more upright and really try to get those arms up high on every repetition here, then you're
going to have a better shot to make sure that you could get more gains from the exercise every
single time you do it. All right, so if you want to continue to keep those stubborn tricep gains
coming, then you got to be willing to continue to make those tricep exercise improvements. And
this is another opportunity right here because this is a popular exercise, it's the dumbbell
overhead extension. And once again it's hitting that tricep long head because of the over arm,
that over head placement of the arm. But instead of holding the dumb bell here, we could hold
something different-- a plate-- and get a lot more out of this exercise to give you better gains from
doing it. You could see right off the bat if I look at the bottom position here between these
two exercises, the plate gives me a hell of a lot more stretch on the triceps. All you got to do is
take a look here at the angle of my arm versus the limitation of the arm right there. I can only get
so far. As a matter of fact, that dumbbell will make contact with the back of my shoulder blades
or my upper back. Whereas the plate, because of its narrowness, will go all the way down,
all the way down to this point on my back. That gives us that better stretch. The second thing
that I want to point out is the position here of the elbows. It's not only a better exercise
for recruiting more tricep muscle contraction here, but it's safer on your shoulders. Because
in this case the elbow is kind of pointing almost straight out towards you guys. Where in this case,
the elbow is pointing out in that direction. Grabbing the plate puts your elbows in a
position out in front of your body, which is more natural. We have something called a scapular plane
where our arms prefer to be at this 45-degree angle. Not all the way out here to be able to
accommodate a dumbbell in your hand. If you make those two switches here, guys, you can see that
every repetition becomes more impactful and more effective, ultimately leading to you having bigger
triceps. And the last one here actually a little bit of a bonus because instead of focusing on
getting that overhead stretch on a long head, I mentioned in the beginning that we could also get
a better contraction if we're willing to get that arm back behind our body. When you think about an
exercise like the tricep push down, you've got to realize right off the bat that the focus is not
about getting the arms behind the body, but just simply extending at the elbows. But we could do
something here too to get that long head involved, and that's where we simply make a little bit of a
swap. So instead of doing the exercise like this where we keep our arms right out in front of our
body and just focus on straightening the elbows, we could do this: we could do an offset grip. What
the offset grip does is it simply gives me much more length by sliding the rope down to get my
arm back behind my body. And all you have to do is take a look at that right there in comparison.
When we look at this drawing here, if my torso is here, my arm is back behind the body that way.
If my torso's here, my arm is actually in the opposite direction, out in front of the body.
The ability to get yourself all the way back as you can see here gets a much stronger contraction
on that long head, which is going to lead to much better gains for you, and to make those exercises
you're already doing better. All right, so with that, guys, the next time you say to yourself,
Jeff, my triceps just won't grow. There's nothing I could do about it. Now you have something to do
about it. You make a couple exercise swaps, you hit the panic button, and you start to do things
a little bit differently. And when you do, I promise you, the gains will be on the other
side. It doesn't mean you're going to stop bench pressing. It doesn't mean you're going to stop
doing the closed grip bench press. Those are great ways to overload the medial and lateral
head. But the real problem area for you is going to always be the largest area of the triceps that
just isn't pulling its own weight. That's the long head, now you got an attack plan for that.
If you're looking for a step-by-step plan, all of our programs actually give you that step-by-step
progression. All the workouts, the meal plans, everything included. You could find them all
over at Athleanx.com. If you found the video helpful, make sure you leave your comments and
thumbs up below. Let me know what else you want me to cover. I'll do my best to do that for you. And
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