6 BEST Triceps Exercises (ANATOMY BASED)

When it comes to choosing tricep exercises, there are many to choose from. In this video, I am going to give you the top 6, or as I like to call them, the Super 6 exercises to build your triceps. To make these selections, we first need to dive into the anatomy of the triceps and their function.

what’s up cavalier athletes. com today we’re talking about the triceps i’m going to show you my super six the six best exercises when you’re trying to build your triceps up and we’re going to base the selection as we always do here on the science and the anatomy it starts at the anatomy always guys in this series it’s going to start with the muscle markers you see if we understand the attachments we can pretty much determine what exercises we need to pick because we see here with the triceps that we have an area here in red which is indicating where the medial and the lateral head of the triceps are and the important point is that they are attaching on the humerus okay the long head has its own separate attachment that’s up here on the shoulder blade that means that it crosses the shoulder joint so there’s some indications that we need to do some different things in other words we have to involve the shoulders in different positions if we want to get the long head well that means that there’s going to be some changes in shoulder position with the exercises we pick but we also have to indicate some other things that are important when we make selections like which exercises allow us to overload which exercises apply a good eccentric stress because these are all the things that we know we can apply to make a muscle grow so what are my selections well let’s start right here okay the very first one that comes up is something i call the rocking push down and the reason why we do this is because we get a lot of advantages we can take that long head of the tricep that has that unique attachment on the shoulder and get it to fully contract and the way we do that is we get it back behind our body the only way you’re going to get a complete contraction of a long head is to get that arm back behind the body with the elbow straight so what i like to do is attach two ropes here because i want to have longer travel and the ability to get my arm back behind my body even further two ropes up here i get in this position you guys have probably seen me cover this before you’ve probably seen others poorly copy it and try to cover it before the fact is to do it right what you do is you get your hands in this position here with the rope as much as you can perpendicular to your forearms right there now we know when we initiate and start pushing down we can maintain that position of the arm here being perpendicular to the rope but in order to keep it there we need to kind of allow ourselves to rock backwards as we get the arm back behind our body so the two goals are try to mirror the rope perpendicular to the forearm here and all the way down to the end and also try to get that arm back behind the body and you can see that it takes that arm all the way through and the tricep through the entire range of motion the next thing we want to do is move over here to the bench the long header i’m kind of obsessed with this at the moment we want to make sure now that we can get the long head on stretch good eccentric overload and actually again create overload because of the weights that we can use on the exercise so we do this exercise here which is the line tricep extension the benefit is if we get to the end of the bench here then we can get a little extra stretch so we’re in this position here we know that we want to finish up with the arms angled back because we know that if we go straight up overhead that there’s a lot of loss of tension because the weight is acting straight down parallel to my forearm so we’re taking a lot of the work away from the triceps if i can go back a little bit then we know that we have some extra work being done but when i get down to the level of the bench there’s nothing stopping me from letting it drop just a little bit more to get more flexion on the shoulder more of a stretch on that long head because of its attachment come up and extend down drop up extend drop down exercise number two number three we pop this up in the same vein we want to have the opportunity to get more stretch on that long head again it’s the only head that has unique attachments from the other two so you want to make sure that you’re exploring ways that you can preferentially hit it because we know any extension of the elbow is going to get the other two heads so what we do is we do this overhead extension with the dumbbell but we do it on an incline like this so you can see the triceps already fired up on that angled position we drop down here and we come up and extend drop down and up and extend you’ll feel a difference here between this and the easy bar variation but the point is you want to do them like this as opposed to sitting up here like that because look at what happens to the elbows as soon as i have to sit upright the elbows point out directly to my sides and my shoulders get back behind my body this is like the same positioning we get from the over uh from the behind the next shoulder press we don’t want that for shoulder health we want to be able to get our elbows in front of our body and because of the incline here you’ll see when i drop the elbows stay nicely in front of the body and i still get that full stretch on the triceps so that’s exercise number three number four the tricep kickback yes the tricep kickback because if you understand everything we just said you’ll realize that you want to be able to load tension on the triceps in a position with the elbow straight and the arm behind the body this is how you do it and this is a great exercise regardless of what anybody says about it you can perform it right here on an incline bench you don’t have to use super light weights and the range of motion is this from here to there here to there it doesn’t mean that an exercise has to have the joints full range of motion to be effective the full range of motion on an exercise is whatever that exercises range of motion is this is the effective range of motion on the kickback from straight down to straight back straight down to straight back and we’re getting the extension of the elbow and the arm behind our body and therefore hitting what we need to hit we don’t need to have the elbow come all the way up here into full flexion to make it effective moving on we need to move some weight even though we’re not getting extension of the arm behind the body on the close grip bench press we’re getting an opportunity to get full elbow extension with heavier loads so we include the close grip bench press in the equation so just outside of shoulder width grip underneath here lift come down same thing applies shoulders down and back get in here nice and tight a little pause at the bottom the extension of the elbow at the top definitely overloading the triceps again no extension of the arm behind the body so less of a long head developer but we’ve already been doing that with the other exercises that we selected but there’s some opportunity to load up some weight here and then finally another opportunity to load some weight but with the additional benefit of actually getting the arm behind the body and that would be this weighted dip so you take a weight around your waist come up here and how you perform this means everything right so we get in here we want to stay upright the more we lean forward the more chest we’re going to develop come around this way the more chest we develop the more we stay upright the more we place the focus on the triceps i also want to get my body through in the chest through behind beyond the hands so that i can take the arm behind the body as we’ve mentioned here many times so what we do is the following we ge