What's up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx.com. Today I'm going to answer the question for you,
which version of the Pushdown is when you're trying to build bigger triceps? I don't know
if you know this, but I'm actually a mind reader. And a few times in this video, I'm going to read
your mind exactly what you're thinking, okay? Let's start first of all, you're thinking,
what the hell is Jeff doing in a tank top? You know you were thinking that. And where can I
get that killer tank top? Well, you actually can't get it over at Athleanx.com because we don't have
tank tops, we have t-shirts that I cut the sleeves off of to create tank tops. We don't have hoodies,
we don't have sweatpants, we don't have shorts. Oh, by the way, speaking of shorts, we do have
is a brand-new Athlean-X shorts channel athlete. Athlean-X videos in 60 seconds or less. You're
going to want to make sure you go over there, check it out and subscribe. That being said,
I digress here, guys. What I want to do is figure out though, what Pushdown is best for you. And to
do that, we all have to be able to do something that we could do right now without having to
be in front of a machine to test it out. And let's stand up and I want you to straighten
your arms, palms down towards the ground, create a hard tricep contraction just like this. They hold
it for about two or three seconds. The next thing what you do now is take your arm, shake them out.
Underhand now palms up and I want you to bring your arms down and contracture triceps as hard
as possible. So now mind read again because I know what's going on in your head right now.
What you're thinking is why the hell did I stop doing the other handgrip push down? Because I feel
that a lot more than I do the overhand grit. And there's actually a reason for it. And I actually
know what else is going through your mind. Here's the third time you're actually thinking to
yourself, I stop doing this because I was told to anatomically it doesn't even matter whether I'm in
pronation or supination that doesn't impact the triceps. How am I doing on these mind reading
things right now, guys? Probably pretty good. Well, you were told good information because
there is no impact on the triceps, whether or not we're supinated or pronated or so we think.
See the biceps, if I'm in this position here and I pronate or supinate, you can see that it impacts
the contraction of the biceps because they're attached to the radius. But with the triceps
being attached to the ulna, it doesn't matter whether it's supination, pronation. Or again,
like I said, so you think. Because if I get into an overhand grip Pushdown or whether I
get into an underhand grip Pushdown, something major happened that you maybe didn't even see.
If I got here and I were to go into isolated pronation or isolated supination, then yeah, that
doesn't impact the tricep at all. But we don't do things that way, we're a kinetic chain. What
we do is we move more than just the forearm when we do supination, pronation. And when we do that,
you can see that we've impacted some other things. We've brought in internal rotation to the shoulder
when we did the pronation an external rotation, we went to supination. And we also have an
impact here, most importantly on the elbow and his position related to my body. If we keep our
elbow tucked nice and tight and our arm back, we're going to get the long head of the tricep,
that big meaty area in the back here, the one responsible for the most size. We're going to
get a better full contraction on that head of the tricep as opposed to in our arms, out in
front of our body and the elbow is drifting. So, you're probably already thinking, well,
I'm already going in the direction then of the underhand pushdown. Well, you're right. When
I'm in this position here at the elbows drift, even just a little bit. And we probably seen the
guys that do this, too and really bastardise it, with just the drifting of the elbow a little bit
in the fact that the arms are a little bit out in front of the body is going to limit
the impact on the long head of the tricep. When I flip underhand like this, you can see that the
elbow is going to get tighter and when I get down in the contraction, the elbow is going to be a
little bit further back behind the body. I will prove that to you one more time, that you don't
just do this in isolation. Because if you did do this, and you could try this yourself, you can
see that you get stopped here. Pronation at the forum doesn't allow me to get all the way down
flat. So how do I get down flat enough to grab the bar? Well, that means I got to substitute at the
shoulder and let the elbow flare out to be able to grab that bar with the palms down grip anyway.
So, if there is a limitation to the underhand Pushdown it's the fact that
this can still be a little bit demanding on the wrist with the underhand grip. So, what you do is
you simply take away the straight bar and you just attach to single handles. And before you start
saying--I'm going to read your mind one more time, but if I don't have a push down machine, how could
I do this? Well, you attach two bands to a pull up bar and you grab hold of a band in each hand just
like that. Or if you do this in a gym on a cable machine, you grab the left hand with the right arm
and the right handle with the left arm and then we get into this position here where we open up
and we press down and back. Okay, now this is going to bring in that second point when
you were saying to yourself, "I can't lift a lot of weight and on the other hand version,
and therefore I shouldn't do it because I'm not stretching the triceps as much as I can."
Well, guess what? The reason why you can't do as much weight there is because the overhand version
of the tricep Pushdown is incorporating a lot of other muscles to the task.
When I get in this position here, I've got the chest contributing,
I've got the shoulders contributing, and I've got the abs contributing to that movement.
We don't want that if we're really trying to hypertrophy the triceps,
looking for inefficiency, taking some of the muscles out. If it's just strength that you're
looking for, then by all means load up the tricep Pushdown and do that, but you should be doing
the other exercises for that. You all should be doing the tricep Close Grip Bench Press,
you all should be doing Tricep Weighted Dips, you all should be doing Skull Crushers.
That makes the overhand version of this redundant. If you want to introduce a new stress, you go
underhand here and you account for the things that are lacking right now from your overhand dominant
Pushdown down based tricep training routine. So, guys, I hope you found the video helpful.
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