Yeah who doesn’t want to do a tricep pushdown on the arm day. I mean this exercise has a great capacity to target your triceps the right way. And there is so many variations to it, but only 2 of them are actually capable of creating good contraction on the tricep, but why only 2. I’m talking about hypertrophy (muscle growth). And if you want to create a good hypertrophy then your goal should not be to only lift weight to the point a to the point b. In our case push the weight down to the point a to point b. You need to find the way to challenge your muscles to get really good contraction of the triceps. If however your is strength then you need to focus on the efficiency of your lift in other words just to lift more weight. But when it comes to tricep pushdown before doing it we need to understand what is the job of our triceps.
Function of The Triceps
And in order to get good contraction of the triceps you need to have full extension of the elbow behind your body. Tricep is an extensor. You may think that you are fully extending your elbow because your arm is getting relatively straight. But I am talking about full extension behind your body getting to the limit of the extension at the elbow provided you don’t have any problem that will block this full extension.
Traditional Pushdown is Limited in The Extension
But let’s take a look at the traditional straight bar
pushdown it is limited in the amount of extension that we can get behind our body or even standard rope push down it’s limited.
Better Pushdown For The Tricep
So how we fix that and that’s very easy to do you just get away a little bit from the rope or the bar you get your shoulders back make the chest first
arms in this position and when you go down just take one step back and see how much extension I got from taking that one step and I’m not going back I just take a one step and I don’t pull that rope it will engage your lats I like to use rope because again it is allowing to get even more extension.
Underhand Better Variation
Ok but what about underhand grip you maybe can’t lift much weight on underhand pushdown and therefore you cannot stress the tricep that much in order to grow them, but the reason why you can’t lift much weight on underhand pushdown as you can in the standard pushdown is that this pronated position will give you internal rotation of the shoulder in which you are very strong trust me and you are helping with your chest too that’s why you can’t lift much weight in the underhand version of the pushdown because going underhand you are externally rotating your shoulders which is more safer so
you grab the left handle of the cable with the right arm and you grab the right handle with the left arm and you get in this position you open up and you press down and back.
If you don’t have access to cable machine than just attach couple bands to the pull up bar and do the same exercise.
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