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00:00Hey folks, Dr. Mike here, and apparently I'm an exercise scientist, and apparently I have five
00:04favorite tricep exercises that are guaranteed, not really, to make you huge. Results may vary.
00:11Forms and conditions apply. Link in the description.
00:23All right, folks. The first exercise that we have is one of my all-time faves, and unfortunately,
00:29I can't do it anymore because I got some combination of too jacked and too immobile to be able to
00:36do it.
00:37Maybe because I'm old and it's just all circling the drain. The Easy Bar Overhead Tricep Extension.
00:42You'll notice that a lot of really jacked guys and pro bodybuilders don't really do this,
00:47probably also because they don't have the mobility anymore. But if you have the mobility,
00:52this is just one of the best tricep exercises you can ever do. But why? One, it's very stable.
00:59You can do it standing. You can do it seated. You have a barbell. Everything is super solid. Get
01:05your feet connected to the ground. You can produce a ton of force through your triceps. Another huge
01:11benefit is you get a massive, massive stretch at the bottom because your elbow is sky high and your
01:18triceps are pulled all the way up. You're pre-stretching the long head of your tricep,
01:23which means this trains all three heads of your triceps to a huge extent. Something like pushdowns
01:29and skull crushers might leave the long head lagging just a little bit. And since everyone's obsessed with
01:34the long head of the triceps, to be completely frank with you, I don't even know what the other two
01:38heads
01:38are called. I've got a head for you. You know what I mean. That was funny. It's a great exercise.
01:46A couple of really awesome cues on this. You're going to want to keep your elbows in at least on
01:50the way down. On the way up, it's totally fine. This keeps the delts from being involved too much
01:54and keeps the tension on the triceps. If you're more comfortable with the flare, it's totally fine
01:58to flare. A slow, controlled eccentric. And on the bottom, you have a choice. You can get the long
02:06head a ton by really stretching back and keeping the elbows vertical at the top. Or you can let the
02:14elbows come down a little bit, touch much closer to the sort of upper part of the back of your
02:20neck,
02:20and get all three heads going and get a major, major stretch and the highest tension
02:25at the stretch. No wrong answers, just variations. I highly recommend this for sets of 10 to 15 to even
02:3320 repetitions. What I find is that for sets of 20 plus, your musculature that's used to stabilize,
02:40like your shoulders and your traps, is just going to cook even if your triceps aren't even ready to
02:44cook yet. It's just going to really fatigue it, make the technique really hard. If you're doing sets
02:49of 5 to 10, it can be done, but you need a buddy to get the barbell up for you
02:52or something like that,
02:53because cleaning and overhead pressing and then getting into this exercise was your 8 rep max is kind
02:59of a tough thing. Sets of 10 to 20, this exercise is cash money. And I mean that literally. If
03:05you do
03:05really good technique sets, gnomes will appear out of nowhere and issue you hard U.S. currency.
03:12What more can you ask for? Are the bills fake? Yeah, they're fake. The gnomes aren't associated
03:17with the actual U.S. government. But good news, you're also diluting the money supply and technically
03:22stealing from everyone else at the same time. Hmm. Folks, my next also favorite tricep exercise
03:32from mega slabs of gains. I guess the thumbnails and titles don't just come directly from anything I say,
03:38so I gotta stop trying to embellish. Here's the thing. The barbell skull crusher can be done with an
03:43easy bar. It can be done with a Smith machine. It can be done with a regular barbell and everything
03:48in
03:48between. The positioning at the top is more important than where you end up at the bottom,
03:56which I've said in many a nightclub. What you want to do is make sure that you're unlocking with your
04:03elbows pointing towards your hips. The first unlock points your elbows this way. Where you go after that,
04:10the triceps take a ton of attention. You can do a skull crusher to touch all the way behind your
04:17neck
04:18on the bench. You can touch the top of your forehead. You can touch the bridge of your nose,
04:23the tip of your nose. You could kiss the bar a little bit though. Technically speaking, I would
04:28never do that at gyms. Google what MRSA looks like on someone's face. You're going to want to do that
04:33on a private browser. You can touch your chin and you can even go super bonus points if you've got
04:38a
04:38spotter that you trust to go all the way down to the neck. That gives you a huge deficit. Elbows
04:45stay in on
04:46the way down. On the way up, it doesn't matter a ton. Try not to just press it up, but
04:51if you have
04:52to for a few reps, that's really awesome. And for an extra super boost, combine every set of these
04:57skull crushers that you do with a quick movement to a set close to failure of close grip presses.
05:04Come all the way down with those, elbows flush, only two-thirds of the way up. Cooked city. Is that
05:11fun? Is that how cool kids say it? Anyway, that's the exercise. All right. My next also awesome,
05:19also favorite, also tricep exercise is the cable push down. Yeah. The cable push down is like the
05:28sloppy Joe at lunchtime and public school of exercises. No one gets super excited about it.
05:35Every Friday, you gotta do it. It was Salisbury steak. Scott, you ever had Salisbury steak back in
05:42the day? Max, Salisbury steak? Young, rich ass kids. Listen, when Scott and I grew up, we weren't
05:48even allowed to grow up. It was Salisbury steak every fucking meal. But it was awesome. Just like the
05:56tricep push down. Yeah, it's regular, but with a twist. So check this out. Most folks will do their push
06:05push downs by starting up here and coming all the way down and then coming all the way back up.
06:11And
06:11there's not a damn thing wrong with that. But what I like to do is put as much tension on
06:16the tricep
06:17and the stretch as possible. And so for me, I'm trying to get real close to the device.
06:23I want my elbows to be behind me and scoot further back the further I go up. So it's not
06:31an extension,
06:31which would be here. Notice my elbows are relatively static. And my wrists and forearms
06:38arc. No, no. This is going to be an almost straight line, which is why it's called a push down
06:44and not
06:44a cable tricep extension. Because the elbows go up and back, but the bar stays flush. As soon as your
06:52biceps and forearms are touching, come back down. Elbows go back and you come back down. The bar stays in
07:00a
07:00straight line. Your elbows stay flushed to your body and you come back down. And what I like to do
07:05is go up nice and slow and controlled. Pause for that deep, painful, annoying stretch. Try not to cave
07:12in. Try to keep your chest up so that it actually stays out of the movement and it's basically only
07:17triceps. Push down nice and quick and then come back up slow. Another variation you can try is the
07:24same exercise, but you push only about three quarters of the way down, maybe two thirds,
07:28keeping the tension in the triceps. Coming back up for a pause. Keep the tension. Back up in the pause.
07:36Only two thirds down. Back up. This is brutal and terrible. And if you're a real masochist like me,
07:43what you can do is you can do these two thirds reps until you're almost failing. And then you can
07:51lock
07:51out the last one. Take your shoulders, lean them over the bar, lock out completely. Now it's bone
07:59on bone action, which isn't bad for you. You're not that fragile. Your triceps get a bit of a break.
08:04And then when you're ready to go again, you lean back and cook a few more reps of two thirds.
08:10When you're really gassed out and you can't do them anymore, lock out, lean over,
08:16wiggle, see if anyone's checking you out. What's up? Yeah. Yeah, it's me. No, I'm good. Too much
08:26staring. Cops get called and you're back to pretending it was just about exercise this whole
08:31time and not about your restraining order. Number four of my favorite tricep exercises
08:40is the behind the neck single arm dumbbell extension. You can do this with cables. If you
08:48did it with a barbell, I would be very impressed. The thing is, yes, behind the neck extensions with
08:55cables and with barbells are awesome when it's two arm. But sometimes it means a lot of spinal
09:02strains. You got a lot of weight up there. You got a balance and stuff. And some people prefer a
09:06little
09:06bit more of a deep stretch and a little bit more mind muscle connection with one arm at a time.
09:12So what we're going to do is we're going to grab a dumbbell and Max, the editor boy, who is
09:18the
09:19demonstrator in all these videos, is going to reach all the way back to touch the middle part of his
09:26middle back. Not even upper, middle. That's the goal. I want you guys to feel this crazy stretch and
09:34tension in the triceps. How you hold a dumbbell doesn't matter a ton, but I do prefer the neutral
09:40grip because with a lot of our pressing, we're doing that overhand grip, which is awesome. That's
09:46probably more power. The neutral grip does realign a little bit of what tricep heads contribute.
09:51It's a novel stimulus. It's variation. It's something fun, and it works ultra, ultra well.
09:57Go light at first with these. A lot of times, because you can do a lot of eccentric control and
10:02really take the reps through a super range of motion, you only have to do 10 to 15 reps per
10:07arm
10:08per set in order to get an awesome stimulus. If you go for 20, the exercise takes so damn long,
10:14the stability ends up screwing you over. Sets of 10 to 15 are wonderful here. Again, control that
10:19eccentric. You don't have to come to a lockout every time going up two-thirds of the way, and then
10:24control that eccentric with a deep pause at the bottom. That'll cook that ass.
10:28All right, folks. My last, but not least, favorite tricep exercise is the low-incline
10:35dumbbell skull crusher with a twist. So you just twist your whole body. Nope,
10:42nope, not a twist like that. You're going to come down with the dumbbells in a neutral grip,
10:48and you're going to go straight down to get as deep below your shoulders as possible for that extra
10:54crazy stretch, letting your elbows come back and up towards your head. From that position,
11:01it's difficult to restart. So it's going to be a very heavy control eccentric. We're going to make
11:06it easier on the way up by you tilting your elbows forward and then doing a JM press style extension,
11:13and then back again for that skull crusher super arc ultra deep. So it combines an arc deep on the
11:21eccentric, rotation of the elbow to get a better angle, and then a press up. It's going to let you
11:27go really close and beyond failure in some sense to triceps because when you have zero reps concentrically
11:35available from this weird bottom position, you tilt the elbow and keep pushing. Phenomenal exercise. I
11:41highly recommend you try it, and it's a great shoulder mobilizer too, and I think that's popular
11:45nowadays because mobility is cool or whatever. Yeah, get you some of that as well. Folks,
11:52a badee badee death out folks. That's Ronnie Coleman quoting Looney Tunes character. How's that for an
11:59austere reference? Anyway, tricep extensions of various kinds, all the tricep movements. There are way more
12:08tricep exercises that are awesome. A lot of them are compound and involve the chest and shoulders a
12:11bit more. Here I was trying to show you guys a little bit more isolation stuff. Are any of these
12:16specifically magical movements that are special and the best? No. There are five of some of my favorites
12:22that I really like to do. I found that they give great results. I would urge you to try a
12:30ton of other
12:31exercises, ones we never mentioned on the channel. There's tons of other amazing folks out there producing
12:36awesome content. Go try their stuff too. Try everything you can. Remember, if you feel the
12:40tension in the muscle a ton, if you get crazy pumps, if you get sore afterwards, it's probably a good
12:47exercise, especially if it doesn't hurt your joints. And like my old man, my pa, my dad, IFBB pro
12:55Jared Feather likes to say, well, you better go to wrestling practice after you finish your homework,
13:00God damn it. I don't know why I had a flashback to that, but I had a tough childhood just
13:05trying to
13:06extend those memories out of my head. Folks, I wish you two things, big triceps and happiness.
13:13So really it's just one. As soon as you have big triceps, happiness is guaranteed. I've been Dr. Mike,
13:18and I'll see you guys. What do I usually say after that? Next time.
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