Triceps Exercises Ranked (BEST TO WORST!)

There are so many triceps exercises, but which ones should you be focusing your efforts on if you want to build bigger triceps and increase your strength? In this video, I’m going to give you the most popular tricep exercises ranked from worst to best and help you to determine which you should be do

And so, with the bench dips, while  you might be on the right track, you’re on the wrong train and this  one’s headed this Snap City.

What s up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx. com. What  you see behind me is a bunch of different tricep exercises. Many of which you probably recognize  because you’ve either done them in the past or you’re still doing them today. However, after  today’s video, you’re going want to get rid of a few of them.

See, I’m going to help you to rank  them from the worst to the best so that you’re left with only the best tricep exercises that are  going to deliver the gains that you’re after. So, as we begin our ranking process here, it’s  important to qualify what goes into the ranking. Because there’s many factors and they all sort  of weight differently. The first thing you going to find is that these exercises have to have  some ability to create some overload. Right?

Even though we’re not picking these based on  strength benefits, we’re really driving them off of hypertrophy. We know that gains and strength  will drive hypertrophy, so you have to be able to overload these exercises to rank pretty high. The second thing we want to make sure is, is it hitting all the functions of the  muscle in question. Here at the triceps, we have three different heads. We want to  see if we can account for all three of them.

The final thing is, is the exercise actually safe? A lot of people will veer towards any exercise in the pursuit of gains. Here in this channel as  always, I’m going to have to consider safety, we’re going to do just that. And so, we will start  the list, as we always do from the bottom up. Yeah, I get it, I know the title is  its best to worst, but it’s my video.

And so, we start off at the bottom of  triceps barrel here with our first exercise, the standing dumbbell powerbomb. Now, somebody  might know this exercise as a standing overhead dumbbell extension. The fact is it is not one  of my favorites and there’s an alternative that will show you later that is definitely better  than this. What I don’t like about this move is that you have two things going on here. Number  one, the position of the shoulder to even perform the exercise.

You literally have to get into  internal rotation at the shoulder in order to place the dumbbell behind your head. And speaking  about your head, good luck not hitting it on the way up and down on every single repetition. There are simply better ways to attack the long head here, this is not one of them. For  that reason, it gets the first big red X. Which brings us to our second exercise here in  the Worst category and it’s the cross face tricep extension.

Now, ever since I first saw this  exercise in Arles Encyclopedia Body Building and actually tried it many years ago, my hate  for the exercise actually has only grown. It comes down once again to the position of the body  and performing the exercise. Look, we know that triceps are worked through extension of the elbow,  but we can do that out of so many positions. This one here is another one that places the  shoulder into that internal rotation position. As a matter of fact, so much so that if  I were to just sit up from the bench, you can see that I’m in the impingement testing  position that I would put somebody in if they came into a physical therapy office.

You don’t want  to get in this position and then add a dumbbell into your hand on top of it. There are many other  ways that we can get elbow extension here guys, this is not one of my favorites. And for that  reason, I give it also the big red X. And that brings us to our third and final exercise  in the Worst category here. And for this, my sights are set squarely on the bench dip.

And this  is an exercise I’ve covered many times before. And I just recently did so again in an appearance  on Live with Kelly and Ryan. And it’s simply the fact that the exercise may be of good  intention, but oftentimes bad execution. When you place your hands forward on the bench,  as many of us do, including myself many years ago until I learned better, this place is  your shoulder into a vulnerable position. You’re literally throwing the head of the humerus  into the anterior shoulder capsule on the descent of every single rep.

If you make the modification,  however, to getting your hands turn outwards as I show them here and get your chest back, you’re  going to get the external rotation that makes the exercise much better. The fact is, many of  us don’t perform this way, especially those who haven’t seen my video on this before. And for  that reason, guys, I have to throw this into the bottom category. And for that matter, since we’ve  been naming exercises, this one has another name, too. It’s called the rotator cuff ripper.

With that, I get to break out my blue marker as we move our way up the rankings into the Better  category. And the first exercise we re going to take a look at here is the rope push away or the  tricep push away. Now, this is a good exercise, however, is the physics of the exercise that  kind of take it down a couple of notches. We know that in order to keep the tension  high on the muscles, you want to have that line of resistance perpendicular to  the moving segment, if we can. In this case, our forearm is where we’re targeting, and the  line of resistance is the cable itself.

And you can see that when we get to the bottom  of the exercise, those two are almost parallel to each other, meaning we don’t have a lot of  resistance on the triceps in the peak contracted state. On top of it, this tends to be one of those  momentum exercises. A lot of times we’ll get our lats involved, we’ll get our core involved, we  ll get a little bit of forward leaning involved, all these things take a little bit away  from the exercise, making it our first in the Better category. We’re going to give  it the blue circle for that reason. Which puts us in the second exercise in the Better  category and this is a good exercise once again.

But in its most basic form here, it has  some limitations and we’re talking about the tricep push down. And whether you perform this  with a straight bar or a rope, the limitations are still the same. We’re talking once again about  the physics of the movement not lining up and giving us the most we can get out of the exercise. Especially considering the fact that I’m going to show you a variation you could do later on that  will. Not to mention elbow position matters here.

As the elbows start to flare more and more out  to the side as they are on any type of overhand push down, you’re going to start to involve  other muscles, particularly the chest, which is going to take some of the effort away from the  triceps and limit the growth that you re seeking there. For that reason guys, the basic push down  is going to fall into our Better category. And that brings us to the third and final exercise  in our Better category here and we’re talking about our next bodyweight exercise, it’s a diamond  cutter pushup. But if you watch my video on the chest rankings, you saw that I placed the basic  pushup in the very same spot. Why?

For the very same reason, the ease of execution. The fact that  there’s a lack of stimulus here if you could do too many of these. Guys, if these are standalone  exercises, they’re not going to provide the hypertrophy stimulus that you’re looking for,  which is one of the main criteria that I placed in this exercise ranking from the very beginning. If  you can bang out 30 or 40 diamond cutter pushups or even 25, you’re simply not being challenged  enough in this exercise to get the