Which Triceps Pushdown is Best for Your Triceps (IT MATTERS!!)

If you want to build bigger triceps then surely you are doing triceps pushdowns right now. But do you know which version of the tricep pushdown is best for building up the size of the back of your arms? In this video, I’m going to answer the popular question of whether the overhand or underhand grip

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. if you haven’t already done so guys, make sure  you click Subscribe not just to this channel, but to the Athlean-X Shorts Channel as well. Remember Athlean-X videos in 60 seconds or less? If you’re looking for program guys, we put the  science into all the selection of the exercises we do, because as you can see here, it matters.

You can find them over at Athleanx. com. And guys, make sure you leave your comments and thumbs  up below. Tell me what you want me to cover in a future video and I’ll do my best to  do that. All right guys see you soon.