The Best Science-Based Triceps Workout For Mass (DUMBBELL ONLY)

Foreign this new Dumbbell Only science based workout series. We'll cover the best workouts for growth for each muscle group starting today with the triceps. Now, although with just dumbbells, your exercise selection does become more limited. The this does not mean that your gains will have to suffer as a result, because by picking the right exercises.

And performing them in the right way.

You can build muscle just as effectively as you could with anything else. But to start, let's first briefly cover the triceps muscle anatomy and what exactly this means for your training. The triceps is a large muscle of the upper arm making up most of the mass of the arm, with its primary role being to extend the elbow. And it's composed of three distinct heads. The long head, which is the largest of the three and located towards the back of the arm. The lateral head, which is located further on the outside of the arm and the medial head, which is the smallest of the three heads. Meaning that when training your triceps, you'll want to choose triceps exercises that enable you to adequately hit all three heads, as this will provide better growth and symmetry in your arms over time. And in this workout, I'll show you exactly how to do just that. The first movement of this workout is going to be the close grip dumbbell press and is going to work the whole triceps muscle, but with most of the emphasis on the lateral and medial heads, as well as some involvement from the chest. And this exercise was chosen for a couple reasons. First of all, it's vital that we start out this workout with an exercise that can be loaded with heavy weight, since we know based on multiple muscle fiber composition studies, that the triceps are typically typ2 dominant, which are theorized to best respond to heavier loads, thus making this exercise an ideal option to accomplish that, since it's a safe and convenient exercise to go heavy with. In addition, we know, based on EMG analysis done on the barbell bench press, that moving the hands closer together shifts more of the tension to the triceps. As a result, we can easily apply that same concept with dumbbells instead by using a close, close grip press where the elbows remain tucked close to the body, as shown here, rather than a traditional wider grip dumbbell press. And as for the optimal pressing angle, a 1994 EMG analysis by Barnett and colleagues found that a flat bench angle produced significantly higher triceps activation than an incline decline or vertical angle during pressing movements, thus indicating that sticking with a flat bench would be ideal. And as you perform this movement ensure that you're using a full range of motion, such that you're coming down to the level of your armpits and then fully locking out at the top in order to maximally contract the triceps. Next, we'll want to move on to incline dumbbell kickbacks set at about a 45 to 60 degree incline, which will be mainly used to target the long head of the triceps located towards the back of your arm. This exercise effectively hits this region of the triceps since it puts your long head in a state of maximum contraction relative to the two other triceps heads. Illustrating this is an EMG study by Behrens and Buskes, which found that inclined dumbbell kickbacks elicited the highest long head activation when compared to other common triceps exercises. And as you can see in the following EMG graph, this exercise activates the longhead to a significantly greater degree than the two other triceps heads, simply meaning that it's a great choice when it comes to emphasizing the long head. However, the researchers also noted that in order to best utilize this exercise for long head development, it's vital that you keep the upper arm parallel with the body and make a straight line between the shoulders and your pinkies, as this is what effectively leads to a peak contraction of the long head. Thus, I'd recommend starting out with lighter weights for this to avoid letting your arms drop as they fatigue and then gradually increase the weight as you get stronger over time. Next, we're going to move on to another exercise to further hit the long head with more volume, since it makes up most of the mass of your triceps, yet is often neglected in a lot of routines. Incline dumbbell extensions are the exercise of choice here, as they place the shoulders in a flexed position, which we know will, as a result, specifically emphasize the long head of the triceps to a greater degree. And doing these on an incline set to roughly 45 degrees enables you to provide an even greater stretch to the long head, since you can now achieve even more shoulder flexion when compared to a flat bench angle. However, as I've stated in the past with this exercise, when performing this movement, you'll want to refrain from starting and ending each rep with your arms directly overhead, since at the top position there's virtually no tension placed on the triceps. So instead, move the arms back slightly, lock them here, and then proceed to perform your reps, as this will now provide tension to the long head of the triceps throughout the whole range of motion leading to better triceps growth in the long run. As a finishing movement for this workout, we're going to use close grip dumbbell push ups, which is going to hit the whole triceps muscle pretty evenly with some involvement from the chest and front delts as well as and by placing your hands on dumbbells as opposed to the ground, it enables us to achieve a slightly greater range of motion and elbow extension for the triceps than we would otherwise, thus providing more tension to the triceps and better growth over time, not to mention the increased comfort it provides on the wrists as well. Now, as for your hand placement, we'll go off the recommendations of this 2016 paper from the journal Physical Therapy Science. The researchers compared triceps activation during shoulder width, wide, wide and narrow grip diamond push ups, and as shown here, the diamond push ups elicited the highest triceps activation when compared to the other grip widths. Simply meaning that when setting up your hand placement for this push up, I suggest setting the dumbbells up for your hands as if you were to do a diamond push up like so, in order to shift as much tension onto the triceps as possible. And with this exercise, you want to aim for higher reps and push close to or to failure, as this is crucial in order to maximally activ the triceps when performing body weight exercises. And then as you get stronger over time, you can continue aiming for even more reps than you did previously. Or you can add weight to your back like so, just to ensure that you're progressing over time. So to sum everything up, here's a sample dumbbell only triceps workout that you can perform using the exercises I previously discussed. In addition to this, I've also made a free downloadable PDF of the workout with reps, sets and tutorials included for every exercise, just so you have something to refer to when you're at the gym doing the workout. And to get this PDF, you can simply head on over to builtwithscience.com dbpdf and I'll send it right over to you.

So there you have it guys. I hope that you were able to see that both choosing the right exercises and performing them in the right fashion is crucial when it comes to building muscle as effectively as possible. This is true not only for the triceps, but for all the other muscle groups that you train as well. And this is exactly why within my built With Science programs, we've taken the time to carefully select each and every exercise that goes into your routines based on science, such that you can build muscle and see results in the fastest manner possible. So if you haven't already, you can simply head over to builtwithscience.com to take this starting Point analysis quiz in order to determine what program is best for you. Anyways, as always, if you enjoyed this video, please don't forget to give it a like leave a comment down below, subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications for the channel as well. As this all really does help me out.

I really hope that you enjoyed the.

First video to this new series. Please do let me know in the comments what muscle group you want me to cover next and I'll get right to it. Thank you so much everyone. I really appreciate it and I'll see you next time.