How to Stretch Your Triceps (AND HOW NOT TO!)

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What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, Athlean-X. com. Today I’m going to show you how to start stretching your triceps the right way. You see, there’s a few problems that we run into when we’re trying to stretch our triceps that’s causing us either discomfort in our shoulders, or to do the stretch wrong in the first place.

Here’s one you probably see all the time, right? You pat yourself on the back, grab your shoulder, and pull back. Pull on your elbow, grab it, pull it across – sometimes you see people doing this – and that’s all well and good. There’s a few things wrong with this. Yeah, I broke out my pen to help you visualize what’s going on.

You see, there’s a lot of times when we’re pulling we’re actually getting this pulling of the skin that you feel and you interpret it as a tricep stretch. Go right now, grab your shoulder like this and just pull your skin as hard as you can. Grab here and pull. You’ll feel like you’re stretching your muscle out, but all you’re doing is just pulling on the skin here that’s causing that sensation. So that’s not the stretch you’re feeling.

You’ll go back up here and do that and a lot of times that’s what you’re feeling and that’s only what you’re feeling. We know that two of the heads of the triceps all start here on the other side of the elbow. On the ulna, radial that you’re working on underneath here, crossing the elbow joint, then they die into the actual upper arm – somewhere on the upper arm. Here, here, but they’re not doing anything with the shoulder. So in order to stretch those out all you have to do is bend your elbow.

As soon as you bend your elbow fully you’re stretching out those muscles because that’s all you have to do. They only cross the elbow joint. The one you really feel when you really feel when you’re stretching out the triceps is the long head of the triceps. That on starts in the same spot, wraps all the way around, and it actually crosses the shoulder joint too because it attaches right here, just underneath the ball and socket joint, okay? Just right here on the scapula on your back.

So we have to figure out, if we’re going to stretch that out, if we go up here and we get into this position, our scapula in this point are a certain distance apart, okay? Where it starts, where it attaches to, they’re a certain distance apart. If I just bend here and do this – I grab here and I do this – these two points are moving together. They’re moving together. There’s no extra stretch going on here because these two points are no further apart then they were when we started.

If you want to get them to move apart further what we have to do is we’ve got to keep that scapula down and depressed here as we move our elbow further away from that point. So we can do that by positioning ourselves over here, up against a wall, or a piece of equipment where you grab hold of your shoulder blade. You can do it. You just reach around, grab for the meat, and then pull down on your shoulder blade. You try to set it in place.

Once you do that, now you bend your elbow all the way so you get the stretch of the tricep going already. We lean into a wall here and then we’re trying to pull down and then lean our body in. My hand can be free here. The point is that my elbows bent all I can and now, by keeping this shoulder blade down and then leaning in and allowing the machine, or the wall, to push my elbow further away, now I’m actually stretching the long head of the triceps. Now I can feel it and I’m also not doing this.

I’m not pulling on my skin. Now, one complication that a lot of people will feel – me included with my bad elbow and my bad shoulder – is that this is a hard position to get into in the first place. So people that use that stretch and feel like there’s pain there, you need another example or another way to do it. So we can do it here on the floor. I have a foam roller setup that allows us to do exactly this.

I come down onto the floor on a foam roller and the key is that, if you can’t raise your arm up, or if you get shoulder pain when you’re doing a tricep stretch, a lot of times because you don’t have good shoulder mobility. What happens is, if you can’t get the extra rotation in your shoulder to get it up you’re basically getting a pinching feeling up there when you’re trying to stretch your triceps out. Another reason why that version of the stretch – the first version, or wrong version – isn’t so great. We can do that though with the foam roller because we can work on two things you’re probably lacking. One is external rotation of your shoulders.

Just by getting onto a foam roller and letting your arms sink back over the foam roller here in the 90 degree position gives me some extra gravity assisted external rotation. The second thing is, you’re probably lacking thoracic extension, right? When your thoracic spine rounds you can’t elevate your arm. I’ve showed you that guy a lot of times. You can’t actually physically elevate your arm because of the blocking that happens.

So if we get on a foam roller we’ve got thoracic extension through the foam roller, we’ve got this passive, assisted gravity of external rotation, and now we can come back here and reach and then pull over. We’re just trying to, again, grab back and pull over from here. I’m actually just grabbing onto my forearm at that point and I’m trying to pinch my shoulder blades down and back. It’s hard to see that on here – to try to keep my scapula down as I try to pull back this way. It’s a lot easier for me and a little more comfortable because I have a better position through the thoracic extension here because of the foam roller.

Guys, you’ve got to start – if you’re going to invest in time to stretch out your triceps you want to learn how to do them right. If you’re going to invest the time to train you’d better learn how to start training right. We train like athletes here at AthleanX. com. The whole point of this is that we want to make sure you’re doing it right.

So I put all these videos together, I’ve put all he programs we have together to make sure that you get way more out of your training. When you do it right you’d be amazed at how much faster you’ll see results. If you’re looking for a complete program that shows you how to do it all, step by step, then head to AthleanX. com right now and get our Athlean-X training system. If you’ve found this one helpful make sure you leave your comments and thumbs up below.

All right, guys. I’ll see you back here soon.