The BEST Dumbbell Exercises - TRICEPS EDITION!

Dumbbells do not have to be a sacrifice when it comes to building bigger triceps. In this video, I’m going to show you the best dumbbell exercises for triceps to fit any goal you may have with your training. If you’re just looking to build the strength of your triceps, want to make them more power

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today we’re talking about the best exercise you could do for your triceps. The catch is, as we’ve done this entire series, we’re restricting our selections to those you can do with just this.

Dumbbells. Look, we’re not talking sacrifices here because the gains you can make with dumbbells are just as good as anything else if you choose the right exercises. With that being said; what type of gains are we talking about? There are a lot of things we could be training for. So, I want to give you guys the best selections for developing strength.

Power. Hypertrophy with eccentric stress as the overload. A metabolic exercise combination to drive hypertrophy as well. A total body combination which, yeah, they do exist when it comes to triceps. The corrective exercises, since I can never completely separate the physical therapist from the strength coach.

And finally, our miscellaneous exercise, which means something that doesn’t really fit cleanly into another category. In this case, when it comes to the triceps, an exercise that allows the maximum shortening, or maximum contraction of the triceps. There aren’t that many when it comes to dumbbells. You guys ready? We’re going to break them down here category by category.

We kick this one off with the category of strength. When it comes to building strength, you want to look for the exercises that allow you to load up with as much weight as possible, as often as possible. So, you have to have some capacity in the lift that you’re doing. In the case of the triceps, if I had access to a barbell, I’d run right over to perform the close grip bench-press because we know that’s the heavy hitter. But we also have a secondary one.

One that sort of ties. That is the upright dip. Simply changing the orientation of your body for more oriented forward, which would hit more of the chest as a vertical pushup. To one that’s more upright, placing more of a demand on the elbows, which will impact the triceps and make that another heavy hitter. Especially because we know we can weight the exercise.

So, let’s start in reverse. If we chose the weighted exercise, we could easily make this a dumbbell swap out because we don’t have to sacrifice the weight. As a matter of fact, instead of just using plates you just strap a dumbbell up, like I’m showing you here. You could even do the equivalent weight and there’s no drop off. You can get all the gains from this exercise that you would with normally loading it with plates.

The fact is, there are a couple of things you want to focus on, not just staying more upright as you can see here. Placing more of the stress on the triceps, but I also like to finish by opening my hands and finishing through extension at the wrist to take the forearms out of it, placing more of that stress on the triceps. But we go back to the barbell close grip bench-press. Now, if you guys haven’t already watched the chest edition in this series, you’re going to want to see that because a similar selection was made. We had to decide whether or not it was just as good to go to a dumbbell version of the bench-press, to take the barbell out of it.

In that case, it wasn’t so good because of the high demand of stability on the shoulders when you make that drop off. I made the point that 300lb bench-pressers do not become 350lb dumbbell pressers. But when it comes to the close grip bench-press, the interesting thing is there is a lot less of a significance in the trade off because of the positioning of the elbows and what it mainly does to the shoulders. When the elbows are out here the stability demands on the shoulders are much greater than they are when the elbows come down and in for the close grip setup. In fact, it’s one-and-a-half times less torque and stress on the shoulders and the muscles around the shoulder girdle to support that.

So you’ll find that when you go to make the swap to the dumbbells you don’t have to sacrifice very much weight at all, which continues to make this a viable exercise selection when you’re trying to build strength without trying to use light weights to accomplish that goal. Guys, you have two options here. I’m going to keep them tied. You pick. Next up we move onto power.

As we’ve discussed here before, when you’re training for power it’s not just about trying to use exercises that allow you to move some weight, but more importantly, to move them quickly. There’s a velocity component here. So, you want to be explosive when you perform the exercise. In that case, my best selection here is the dumbbell JM press. This is a modification of an exercise created by JM Blakely, where we traditionally use a barbell.

But again, I don’t feel there’s a significant drop off in doing it this way. The goal here is that we want to try and be explosive. We want to move this weight with some speed. So, we select the weight that’s heavy enough, but still easily commanded for us to move in space. That initiation of the movement driven by the elbows – actually, the shoulder joint itself – is allowing an object in motion to stay in motion.

We’re getting the inertia overcome by the movement of the elbows, not necessarily by the triceps. But once we get going the triceps can mechanically take advantage and kick in, really accelerating that weight. But I have another option, too. I have two ties to start off this video. The fact is, as I’ve pointed out in other videos, ideally when you’re trying to train for power, if you can explode your body or the weight through the concentric with no deceleration component – because even in the JM press, at some point you’re decelerating the dumbbells as they reach full extension to protect the elbows.

We wouldn’t have to do that if we setup here like this in a bodyweight, plyo diamond cutter pushup. The idea here is, there is no limitation. You’re pushing concentrically through the ground, as explosively as possible, and the only thing that would stop you is the roof. And I don’t think you’re going to be able to push off the ground that hard to get there. As always with power here, you want to train sub-fatigue.

So, take a series of repetitions here and stop about three or four reps short and the same thing would happen, and apply, with the JM press. We move on now to hypertrophy. While we know that strengthening your muscles is a great way to create gains, we also know those gains can potentially dry up because progressively overloading an exercise can hit a wall rather quickly. So, you need some other weapons in your arsenal. One of the best ways to do this is with eccentric overload of the muscle you’re trying to grow.

We can do that great here with the lying dumbbell tricep extension. This is one of my favorite exercises. Period. Why? Because we can get enormous stretch on the triceps because of the positioning of the exercise.

I’m able to lay down and get my arms up and over my head. Why is that so significant? Because we can place the stretch on the largest portion of the triceps – that being the longhead – in the bottom portion of this exercise. Don’t make the mistake that a lot of people do. They bring the dumbbells all the way up until their arms are straight up over their body.

You lose a lot of tension applied to the triceps by doing that. Always keep them slightly angled backward throughout the entire exercise. But here’s where it gets even better. When you reach failure, we know another way to illicit hypertrophy and muscle gain is to train through failure. Increase the intensity of your work.

Go until you can’t do anymore of reps of the lying e