Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:34 Triceps anatomy, biomechanics and function
02:20 Bench press vs skull crusher study
03:17 Lateral and medial head overtraining problem
03:51 Solution 1: Make your chest and shoulder work not activate the triceps as much
05:24 Solution 2: Straight arm pulldowns – lat prayers
06:15 Selecting your triceps isolation exercise
08:04 Stretch mediated hypertrophy?
09:05 Practical application and takeaways
10:19 Outro
Transcript:
Many lifters primarily train their triceps with pressing exercises and push downs. Neither is ideal to build big arms. At first glance the triceps might seem like a simple muscle. It straightens the arm so we do exercises that straighten the arm like push downs and bench presses. However, in reality, the functional anatomy of the triceps muscle is a little bit more complex, and this has profound implications for how you should train the triceps for maximum muscle growth. So let’s go into how to build a horseshoe triceps based on its biomechanics.
The word triceps means three heads. You have the medial and the lateral head. The medial has being very tiny and mostly underneath the other muscles. The lateral head being the part on the outside that you see very well, it’s the part when you flex and there’s this chunk that comes up. That’s the lateral had. And then you have the long head on the back. The long head is very large. The long head is in fact the largest part of the triceps by far. And it’s also thereby the biggest part of the arms. The long head of the triceps is key to build bigger arms. And it’s precisely the long head that is a little bit more complex. The long head originates not on the humerus, but on the scapula, on your shoulder blade. That means it is a bi-articulate muscle. It crosses not just the elbow joint, but it also crosses the shoulder joint. And it means it’s active at the shoulder specifically for shoulder extension. The long head essentially helps the lats to pull down your elbow to your sides. It’s also weakly active as an adductor like in a wide grip pull down, especially if your shoulder is externally rotated. So if your arms like this, then the long head can also pull the elbow back down to your side again from that position.
This dual function of the triceps creates a bi-articulate conflict during pressing exercises. During pressing exercises you want to extend the arm, so the body would want to activate the long head of the triceps along with the other heads. However, activating the long head of the triceps would also cause the triceps to pull your elbow down back. And that’s disadvantageous because you want to flex the shoulder. So if you create a moment for shoulder extension, it’s sabotaging what the delts and the pecs are doing to raise your arms up. A muscle can only contract or it cannot contract. The triceps cannot decide to be active only at the arm but not at the shoulder. Therefore, the body does not seem to activate the long head of the triceps as much during a bench press as during, say, a skull crusher.
We have a direct study on this that compared the triceps gains people got when they trained their triceps with barbell bench presses versus barbell skull crushers. The skull crusher group achieved approximately double the rate of total triceps growth and this growth was specifically attributable to significantly greater gains in the long head of the triceps. The big impact of greater growth in the long head also exemplifies, again, how important it is to build the long head because it’s the biggest part of the triceps. The logical implication of this, for your training programing, is that you need to count the training volume of the long head and the lateral and the medial head separately. The medial and the lateral head, you can combine those and they will be activated during all types of triceps exercises and barbell bench presses. However, the long head is active during triceps isolation exercises, but not during pressing exercises. So you would count it either partially or, for simplicity sake, perhaps not at all. means five sets of barbell bench presses count as five sets for the lateral and the medial head, but they don’t count towards volume for the long head.
Now, when you start designing a training program this way, counting the volume for the long head and the other heads separately, you will notice a problem. It is very difficult to design a training program the does not overtrain the lateral and the medial heads, while also sufficiently training the long head. Indeed, the way most people design their training programs results in unintentionally training the lateral and the medial had far, far more than the long head. There are many people that essentially overtrain the other heads while still having the long head under-stimulated. This is because of doing a lots of pressing exercises that train the triceps, but not the long head, and then doing a lot of push downs that train both of the heads.
There are two ways you can solve this problem. First: You can make your chest and your shoulder work not activate the triceps as much. Pressing exercises are not ideal triceps builders anyway, so if you have the time it’s better to do the triceps work separately and then use your delt and your chest work primarily to train the delts and your chest. So, you could do more lateral raises, for example, instead of overhead presses, more flies… You can also do cable chest presses and importantly, you can use dumbbells. I’m a big fan of dumbbells because they allow for greater range of motion, both for overhead presses and for dumbbell bench presses as opposed to using a barbell. So you get more raise motion, which is probably better for the pecs and the delts and using a dumbbell significantly reduces the influence triceps have on the movement. When you’re using a barbell there is lateral force production. So if you’re holding the barbell, any force that you produce from triceps goes like this, right? Because the triceps straightens the arm, but the barbell is fixed, so it produces lateral forces, forces that go outward. Since the barbell cannot move that helps you push the weight up. I explain the physics of this in more detail in this video.
With a dumbbell you don’t have this. So with a dumbbell, if you are pushing up and now you activate the triceps a lot, you will throw the dumbbell out to the side. Therefore, dumbbell exercises have very little triceps activity and they are very poor triceps builders. They will grow the lateral and the medial has a little bit. You can probably even just not count the volume. And it will have almost zero effect on the long head. So I wouldn’t count that at all for a long head. This is a benefit because this allows you to do more triceps isolation work which trains all of the heads of the triceps so that you can get balanced total development. And again, noting that the long head is by far the most important to get bigger arms. So it’s most important to train the long head well then to train the other heads well.
The second way to balance out the volume between the heads is to use straight arm pull downs, or lat prayers. Lat prayers are great for the long head of the triceps because when you’re doing a straight arm type of pull down, the long head helps the lats. It will both help straighten the arm as a stabilizer just to keep your arms straight, but it will also help the lats with shoulder extension. So putting your elbow down back at your side. Many people view the activity of the triceps during lat prayers as kind of an unintended side effect, but it’s actually very much a targeted muscle group during the exercise, and it’s ideal that we can train the triceps and train the long head without overloading the other heads, so that balances out the volume, because we have a lot of other exercises, maybe our pressing exercises that already train the medial and lateral heads without training a long head very well. So having an exercise that trains the long head very well, but not the other hands helped balance this out and make sure you get balanced total triceps development. The unique biomechanics of the long head versus the other heads also influence how we should select our triceps isolation exercises.
Many people do a lot of push downs. However, we have direct research showing that push downs result in approximately 40% less triceps growth compared to overhead triceps extensions. I have long been a proponent of overhead triceps extensions because when you train the triceps with your arm overhead, the triceps is now, the long head specifically, is stretched because the shoulder is flexed. So when your arm is overhead, shoulder flexed, long head becomes stretched because it stretched out at the shoulder, and you can get more stretch mediated hypertrophy. And that’s indeed what the research shows. You get more growth in the long head when you’re training it overhead. Interestingly, in the best study we have on this, it wasn’t just the long head that grew more when training the triceps overhead. The other heads also grew more from the overhead extensions versus the push downs. Why is this?
Well, my theory is that during a push down, it’s not just the fact that the long head is not stretched, it’s also that in the stretched position, so the top position of push down, like this, there is very little tension. The top position of a push down is very, very easy. When you fail to lock out the weight at the bottom, you can still probably do many repetitions. That’s also why many people intuitively don’t quite fully lock out the elbows during push downs, because it just limits how much weight you can lift so much. During overhead triceps extension the problem is not nearly as bad because by definition, forearm is quite literally the moment arm. So there’s maximum tension in this position at 90 degrees. So this whole range is loaded quite well. And even the very bottom position of the movement still has quite some tension on the triceps. So it’s not just that the long head is more stretched and therefore experiences more stretch mediated hypertrophy, there is also more tension in the lengthened position with an overhead triceps extension compared to a push down. So the overhead triceps extension wins on both fronts. And it’s probably why in this study they found greater growth in all the heads.
On a technical note, there is some debate about whether the term stretch mediated hypertrophy is appropriate to use for these types of findings. my view it is. The term stretch mediated hypertrophy is not being properly defined in research, and I use it to denote any type of growth from emphasizing longer muscle lengths, whether that is from literally stretching the muscle, like yoga style, or with some other apparatus, or weighted stretching, or whether that’s from training at longer muscle lengths. An argument can be made that those are different things. That growth you get from stretching, literal stretching, like yoga type stretching, might be different from the growth you get from training a muscle at longer muscle lengths. If there is indeed a distinct mechanism of action there, it might be useful to use separate terms for those. As it stands, though, we don’t have a term for the growth we get from training muscles at longer muscle lengths. So I think it makes sense to call that stretch mediated hypertrophy. After all, a muscle that is at a longer muscle length is stretched more. Therefore, the term stretch mediated hypertrophy to me makes a lot of sense to refer to both phenomena until we have clear evidence that there are distinct mechanisms of action for both of these terms.
All right. So practical application. There are a few takeaways you can get from this video. First: For the triceps you want to do a lot of isolation work. Most pushing exercises don’t train the long head of the triceps well because of the bi-articulate muscle conflict. So it’s best to do a lot of triceps isolation work, specifically overhead triceps isolation work. So I’m a big fan of skull overs, skull crushers, if your elbows like that… In general, any type of overhead triceps extension, whether it’s a rope, a dumbbell, anything is probably a pretty good exercise. Push downs are not bad, and they can be good on the elbows for some people, but they’re also not ideal. Kickbacks, similarly, are not that great. Another application is that you can balance out the volume for your triceps by not stimulating the lateral and the medial heads with your pressing exercises as much. You can do this by using cables or dumbbells or convergent machines, so that you focus more on your delts and your pecs when you’re training your pecs and your delts, and then you focus more on your triceps with triceps isolation exercises. Moreover, you can balance out the volume from all the work that you get from the lateral and the medial head from the pressing exercises that you do, because you’re probably going to do something with straight arm pull downs or lat prayers. Lat prayers will train and isolate the long head of the triceps in a very good way. So that balances out the volume that you get from your pressing exercises, which doesn’t stimulate the long head very well, but does stimulate the lateral and medial heads.
I hope you’ll find this info useful in your quest for horseshoe triceps. If you like this type of evidence based fitness content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.