What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today I'm going to show you the right way to do a tricep pushdown so that your triceps
are getting a majority of the work.
You see, there's another version – a popular version – the way people do tricep pushdowns,
and they actually turn them into, what I call, a jackhammer pushdown.
They lean over the top, they get their elbows flared out, and then they start jackhammering
away.
Just like this.
That ain't going to cut it.
Why?
Because as I said, we're actually not really training the triceps all that much there.
Yeah, you might be loading the weight up on the stack a lot more than you would on a regular
pushdown, but does that mean that you're getting more work done on the triceps?
The answer is a definite no.
So here's the right way to do it.
I'm going to explain why we tend to do the other version.
The right way is that we want to get your elbows into your sides, and your hands away
from your body, okay?
Now, away from the body is doing a couple things that might actually make you feel less
likely to want to do this.
It's making the weight heavier because the further out we can make this rope from the
area that's hinging here – this fulcrum point – that's going to make the weight
a little bit heavier, as opposed to whether my hands were in, close to my body.
You can try this yourself, but just taking the rope, keeping the arm against your chest,
your hand against your chest, elbow in, and push down.
I can at least move this weight stack that's up there right now.
If I take my hand and put it out, though, from the same position, and I try to push
I can't really budge this stack.
That's because the weight effectively got heavier on the tricep, but who cares what
it says there?
It's what it feels like here when you're trying to build it.
So why do we do this then?
What's the jackhammer all about?
Some of us start off with good intentions.
We start off here, and we press, and then as we get tired we start leaning, and leaning,
and leaning, and elbows start flaring, and flaring, and flaring, and before we know we're
doing the dreaded jackhammer pushdown.
That's because we're getting so much more help from the muscles that really weren't
intended to participate in the first place.
The chest and the shoulders start taking over and doing all the work.
If you look at the exercise a little bit more carefully.
You come here like this, elbows are flared.
I'm leaning over the top.
The first thing I've done is, I've created a hell of a leverage right here for my body,
on top of this, to push down from here.
I am all over this thing.
As opposed to here, relying on the muscles to actually create that leverage.
The second thing is: in this position, when I start pushing down, what does it resemble
to you?
If you look closely you can see the activation of the chest.
You can see the activation of the shoulders.
This is no different than a dip.
Just because my hands are a little bit wider apart I'm still doing a dipping motion.
As a matter of fact, if you do this exercise I'm showing you here, this is a straight bar
dip.
This is an actual exercise.
That is literally recreating the motion, and the movement at the elbow of what this exercise
does.
But the ironic thing, and the capper to all this, is when I do the jackhammer pushdown,
and I come down, I actually don’t even get – most of us – don’t even get full extension
at the elbow.
You can see there's still more room to go.
Extension at the elbow is what the triceps do.
The final point – because there is another point – is that the longhead of the tricep
is now in front of the body and we know, in order to fully contract it, we have to get
extension of the arm back, behind the body.
So let's revisit the real way to do it.
Don’t keep the hands in.
get them out.
Lighten the weight stack if you have to.
Stick your chest out and now press down.
Now we've got a tricep exercise.
Now we've got the right way to do this exercise, regardless of what the weight stack says.
I can tell you right now, there's a mini-fire going on in my triceps.
Now, how far up do you bring it?
You want to bring it just about to chest level, but the more important thing is what's going
on with the elbows.
If the elbows start migrating up, now we start cheating from the other side.
Now we've got to cheat from the top down and we don’t want that because we can get the
lats cheating, and we can get the abs cheating.
We don’t want either of those.
So you keep it right here, about the level of the chest, and we press down from there.
You can see all the way to the back, the tricep, all the way to the longhead, is doing the
work.
Guys, I hope you've found this video helpful.
Remember, this one came from our 23 Exercise Fails video.
Not because we're trying to poke fun of the exercise.
It's because it's recognizable.
We see people doing it.
We've done it ourselves.
It's not the way you want to do the exercise.
In the meantime, if you're looking for a program that lays it all out, it's not just about
the exercises, but it's always about how you do them; head to ATHLEANX.com.
Get one of our programs.
Use the program selector in the link below this video to find the one that's most suited
to the goals that you're looking to achieve right now.
In the meantime, if you liked this video leave your comments and thumbs up below.
Let me know what you want me to cover in a future video and I'll do my best to do that
for you in the days and weeks ahead.
All right, guys.
See you soon.