Mark Ottobre from Enterprise Fitness walks through five triceps exercises with trainee Kay, covering grip position, elbow alignment, and cadence for each. He emphasizes a 4-second descent on close-grip presses, slow stretches on dumbbell extensions, and locking out at peak contraction on rope work to maximize arm growth.
In this video, I'm going to be showing you the 5 best tricep exercises to help you develop new arm growth. Hi, my name is Mark Ottobre. I'm the owner and founder of Enterprise Fitness. I've trained thousands of people to head-turning results. The first exercise is the 1 1/4 close grip press. We're going to use a biochromial grip. So when you're doing this, the easiest way to find biochromial is think like a zombie, arms out in front. Now grab the bar. That's our biochromial grip. We want a 4-second down cadence. So it's going to be 4, 3, 2, 1. He comes to his chest, he comes up a quarter, back down and back up, really enhancing that tricep. 4, 3, 2, 1, up to my hand, back down and power up. So just remember 3 things you're looking for on this: big chest, keep your arms close, and really get that cadence right. Should be 4 seconds down, Don't bounce off the chest. Quarter up, back down, extend out. Exercise number 2 is decline lying tricep extension, and I love this exercise for so many reasons. So this is a great one. You're overhead, you're able to use a fair amount of weight, but being on the decline enhances the range of motion. So come up. Cue number 1 is I like to put my finger in people's elbows, and I want you to wrap your whole arm around my finger. So as you do it, wrap my— your whole arm around my finger and push back up. There you go. Cue number 2 that I like is the head of the dumbbell. Try and make that face and touch your shoulder. So make that face and touch your shoulder. That's excellent. And cue number 3 is looking at the axis and the arm of where the elbows are. So Kay's elbow is here at the moment. We want to pull him back a little bit, and what we'll find is as he does this, he'll get enhanced stretch through his tricep. Go ahead and do that. Try and make that touch, touch your shoulder, touch— pointing elbows back even a bit further. There you go. Really get that stretched out. One of the things that I find a lot of folks when they're feeling it elbows is elbows are actually too far forward. By bringing it back, we use more tricep, but you do also need to consider load. So summary: make sure the elbow is in the right position, get the head of the dumbbell onto the shoulder, and lower in a nice slow cadence. Exercise number 3 is tricep rope extension with a twist. So Kay does it the way most folks do it, right? So he's coming in short. Look at his hand position. I really want you to take note of his hand position. He lets the rope dictate where his hands go. We really want to get that back head of the tricep, that horseshoe shape. You bend your knees a tiny bit, stick your butt out towards me. Now come and do it. Now what I want you to do is I want you to wrap and really open up. So try and get your hands— so both of them neutral— split that bar. I want you to control it. So you like snap the bar, don't think about it. There you go. And lock that elbow, lock that elbow out. I want more, more, more. There. Do you feel that, the difference there? See his hands? I want this action. This action, okay? Not, not here, that. We're twisting. That will light— that'll make all the difference in feeling it kind of medial to really getting that back head of the tricep. To summarize, the keys to this is hand position, open up, that's number 1. You've really got to snap the rope. Key number 2 is you need to lock your arm and pause. Exercise number 4 is overhead tricep cable extension. Again, we spoke before about manipulating joint angles, so this is really one of the— I mean, besides the lying tricep decline one that we've already done, the elbow's now really, we are elongating the triceps, we are stretching them right out, and now he's going to be extending. So the triceps should be under a full stretch position in here. One thing that I never do is I never grab their elbows. You can really hurt someone if you grab their elbows and they don't have the range of motion and they've got load pulling them on the other side. You can verbally cue them, but don't physically put them into that position. Off you go. All right, so what we want— what I want for Kay, I'm going to give him the verbal cue— is I want you to bring your elbows behind your body more. Keep going and bring those elbows, really stretch it out. And you can probably see that stretch being more enhanced there. That's nice. So again, what we're looking looking at when we're assessing this is these, these angles of the elbows, and we really want these angles to be as vertical as possible. So we're really stretching out all that tricep. We're going to feel weaker in this position. Why? Because we're in a full stretch position. Anytime in that full stretch position, we're putting ourselves in a disadvantageous position to extend, but still very, very important. Might not get a crazy pump from this exercise, but it is an important exercise to do to make sure you're ensuring you're hitting all heads of the tricep. Fifth and final exercise is our tricep pushdown, which is our meathead exercise. It's the one we're going to be able to go nice and heavy and really overload it. And that's also why we're doing it at the end as well. Go for an offset stance. There you go. That way we just anchor down and put all the weight into your heels. Bend your knees a little bit. Let's rotate the hips out so we're in a nice stable position. Next thing I'm going to get you to do is pull your wrist down, cock the wrist down like this. There you go. The first manipulation I want you to make is I want you to push this really close to your body. So push it into your body. So as you push down, go push and try and push it close, push it close. So it's really enhancing that medial part of the tricep. Now as you come up, push it away from your body, right? So it's almost like an omni pushdown where we're pushing it really close into our body and then pushing it away from our body. Do a couple of those, just do 2 or 3 of those just to demonstrate for the folks. No, it needs to be closer. Push it away from your body, push it away from your body, push it away from your body. Go again. Push it close, push it— no, no, no, in closer, in closer, in closer. So now keep your elbows forward, and if we need to, okay, I'm going to get you to rock from your body. So this is how to cheat on your own. So let it come up, and now use a bit of force down. There you go. You've got 2 more on your own like that. Use a bit of force from your body. Let it rock up. Use some force from your body.
