What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today I’m going to show you how to absolutely annihilate your triceps in less than 10 minutes.
You only need one – at most, two – pairs of dumbbells.
You can do it at home and it’s going to take you less than 10 minutes.
The thing is, we’re going to put the science back in strength, as we always do.
We’re going to utilize mechanical drop sets here to allow you to keep going even as the
fatigue mounts through this quick workout.
Second, I’m going to show you why, and how to preferentially hit the longhead of the
triceps, the one that accounts for the majority of the size and bulk of the triceps themselves,
and by doing so, allowing you to see and use exercises that hit it in its most effective
ranges.
Both in its stretched position, and in its fully contracted position.
They key is putting it all together, showing you how to do it step by step, knocking it
out, and then when we come back I’ll tell you exactly why this works as well as it does.
You thought I was kidding when I said it was brutal, huh?
Well, I’ll tell you this: it is, but it’s going to work.
You guys know that the ‘what’ is never good enough for me either.
The ‘why’ is important because when you understand why these things work they become
that much more empowering.
What we’re looking at, the first thing I wanted you to notice from that workout is,
you’re going from, and changing a position of your body.
From lying on your back, to being upright, to get into this prone, or semi-prone position.
One of the reasons I do this is because I want to make this exercise and workout entirely
memorable.
We know that we’re doing two exercises in one position, two exercises in the next, and
two exercises in the next.
There’s a bit more ease to recall we can get from having it setup that way.
Beyond that, we go back to that whole concept I said about mechanical drop sets.
If you look at this first combination here, you have the dumbbell lying tricep extension,
into the dumbbell close grip bench-press.
Let’s say we select a weight that allows us to fail at a 10 to 12 rep range on the
lying dumbbell extension.
We really shouldn’t be able to do anymore reps from our triceps if we’ve reached failure.
That is unless we utilize a shortened moment arm.
If we take some of that length away, the distance from the dumbbell to the triceps, and we shorten
it by bringing it up over our chest, we can utilize the same weight, and continue to rep
out by alleviating some of that load on the triceps.
We do that now, and we move onto the next combo here.
The next combo, now we’re sitting up and doing the overhead tricep extension into the
dips.
By simply placing the dumbbells on the ground and giving us something to push off from.
The best thing about this combo, as we mention again, the longhead of the triceps.
In this combo we’re actually taking it through a fully stretched position by having our arms
up over our head, into a fully contracted position by having our elbows back behind
our body, when we get into a fully straightened elbow.
Once again, we’re able to utilize a mechanical drop set.
Not necessarily by changing the moment arm, but by having a loaded versus an unloaded
exercises option to drop down to.
Remember, when we’re doing this overhead loaded position, you guys know how I feel
about this position when it comes to the shoulder and shoulder health.
We don’t want to have our arms all the way back here, stretched, trying to lift this
dumbbell up.
What we do is, we’re placing our arms in a lot of internal rotation to get into that
position.
Instead, if we let our elbows drift forward here and we work it, we’re still getting
the same effect on the tricep.
No matter whether I’m going way out to the side, or whether I’m going in here more
with the elbow forward.
The key is that we’re alleviating some of that unnecessary stress that we have to put
on our shoulder to do so.
Finally, we drop into that final combination here.
That is the kickback into the close grip pushup.
The benefit of the kickback here is, once again, I’ve always talked about how I think
this is one of my favorite exercises for hitting the tricep because we get that elbow back
behind the body to get that full contraction on the triceps.
By actually getting the longhead into its fully shortened state.
Something that we don’t get through every, single tricep exercises we do.
Especially not from just rope pushdowns.
Once again, mechanical drop set.
We can take an exercise that’s weighted and go to an exercise that’s unweighted
– like the bodyweight tricep pushup – and rep out and continue to go even further.
Now, we’re taking a one-minute break between these combos so we can recharge ourselves
to get the most out of it, and there is that one opportunity that you have to switch the
dumbbells right before that final combination.
We do know that not a lot of us are strong when it comes to the tricep kickbacks.
So, you might want to have that secondary set of lighter dumbbells here.
But even if you did it and you carried through the same dumbbell that you used from the first
exercise, you’re just going to limit the rep total that you can do at that stage of
the game.
So, there you have it, guys.
A quick workout for you that you can do in less than 10 minutes with a single set of
dumbbells, or two, and it’s going to work.
Guys, you know if you can put the science back in strength it’s going to unlock a
lot of potential you’re probably sitting on right now.
I know how much more all of us have.
We do have an athlete inside of us, we just need to be able to unleash it.
By putting science in our training plans, that’s how you do it.
If you’re looking for a step by step plan, guys, I have it all available for you at ATHLEANX.com.
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Let me know what else you want me to cover and I’ll do my best to do that for you in
the days and weeks ahead.
All right, see you soon.