The SECRET to targeting the LONG HEAD of the TRICEPS! (FULL VIDEO)

What's up everyone? I'm Michael Kamalu, medical student at the Mayo Clinic here with Games Without Pains and today I'm going to walk you through something that 99% of people who work out don't understand and therefore do wrong and that's how to work the long head of the triceps, the biggest part of the biggest muscle in your arm. If you go on to Google or YouTube or Instagram and look up how to work the long head of the triceps, the vast majority of what you're going to get is people saying you got to get your arms up above your head and extend. Now if that's what you do, sure you'll get a good extension of the long head of the triceps, but extension is only half the workout. In order to really hit a muscle, you have to get full extension and full contraction and that movement does not get a full contraction of the long head of the triceps. The best part is you don't have to just take my word because anatomy does not lie. First let's do a brief review of the basics. What are the triceps? Triceps is the main extensor of the upper limbs, so it brings your arm from here to here. Because it's a posterior muscle group, I'm going to have to flip this guy around in order for you to start seeing them. If I rotate this guy 90 degrees, we start to see the triceps coming into view. Now what you have highlighted here is actually the lateral head of the triceps, which is what shows up here when somebody flexes on a lateral view. It's actually the lateral part of that classic horseshoe. The other part being the long head of the triceps, which is what we're going to focus on today. In other videos, I can give you workouts to target that lateral head of the triceps. If we flip him all the way around, now we can start to see both the lateral and the long head of the triceps and there's your horseshoe right there. But tri means three, right? So there should be three heads of the triceps. There are, but the medial head of the triceps is actually located anterior to the other two, so on this view you can't really see them. So I'm going to go ahead and isolate this muscle group for you so you can take a better look at the anatomy. Alright, so what I've done now is I've taken away all the other muscle groups so you can get a really good view of the anatomy of the triceps. Here we got the lateral head, the long head, and then if I flip this around for a front view, now we can start to see the medial head of the triceps. Now what I want to focus on and the real gem of this anatomical perspective is the origination and insertion points of these muscles. It's important to understand that when you're at the gym and you're working on a muscle, what you're doing is you're bringing the insertion point closer to the origination point in order to get a full contraction, aka workout, of that muscle. So we see here that the lateral and the medial heads originate on the humerus, right here, upper arm, and travel down to insert on what's called the olecranon process of the ulna, right here. So when you flex these muscles, they bring the insertion point closer to the origination point, hence the extension of the arm. But take a look at the long head of the triceps. It doesn't even originate anywhere on the arm. Its origination point is on what we call the infraglenoid tubercle of the scapula, aka back of the shoulder. Now this is key, this is what almost nobody understands. Because it originates on the back of the shoulder, a simple extension of the elbow does not provide you with a full contraction of the long head of the triceps. In order to get full contraction, you got to bring the insertion point, which is still the olecranon process of the ulna, closer to the back of the shoulder. So in order to work that muscle, you actually have to bring your arm behind your body, an extension of the shoulder joint. So now it's easy to see why people tell you to get your hands up above your head to work the long head of the triceps, because you are bringing the insertion point further away from the back of the shoulder, so you're getting a good stretch of that muscle. But just like I said, extending the arm from there, you're not getting a contraction of the long head of the triceps. You're getting a contraction of the other two. The only way to get a full contraction of the long head of the triceps is to bring that arm behind your body. So now that we've got the anatomy down, we know the science behind the workouts, let's check out what lifts you can do to target the long head of the triceps. Alright guys, this is a modified version of the tricep pulldown. You'll want to use either a rope or just the cable itself with no handle, so that you keep your wrist in a neutral position and are able to bring it behind your body. The motion starts with your arm bent at the elbow and leaning forward a little bit, so that you get an extension of the muscle before you begin the contraction. When you're bending your arm, be sure to still keep your elbow tight by your side. The tendency is to bring the elbow forward, but this will make you recruit your back muscles when you retract it instead of your triceps. Once your arm reaches that neutral position to the side of your body, squeeze your triceps and drive your arm back behind you, and that's when you're going to get that maximal contraction of the long head of the triceps. One of the easiest mistakes to make with this lift is to start with the cable too high up. You work a muscle by pushing or pulling 90 degrees to resistance, which in this case is the cable, and if you see, by the time I am pulling my arm behind my body, it is virtually parallel with the cable and providing zero resistance when I am contracting the long head of the triceps. Compare that to this screenshot of the correct form, and you'll see that the cable is almost perfectly 90 degrees to my arm by the time I am bringing my arm behind my back, providing maximum resistance for the long head of the triceps. The next mistake is probably the most common mistake at the gym across all lifts, and that is swinging, using momentum to move the weight rather than the muscle. If you go back and watch my correct example, you'll notice I use very slow, deliberate contractions. I even pause slightly at the bottom to make sure that there's no momentum carrying my arm, and that the only thing bringing my arm behind the shoulder is the muscle group that I'm trying to target. Now, I do recommend using these exercises together with overhead tricep extensions, because like I mentioned earlier, in order to get a complete workout of a muscle, not only do you need the full contraction with the exercises I gave you, but you also need full extension, which is what overhead extensions give you. And in another video, I'll go over proper form for those, because that's important as well if you don't want to injure your elbows or your shoulders. And unfortunately, most people do overhead tricep extensions wrong as well. One final fun fact for you, the long head of the triceps is actually what makes up most of the bottom half of your bicep flex, so no matter how big or toned your biceps are, if you don't have a nice long head of the triceps to go along with it, if you've been neglecting that, then your flex is still going to look pretty weak, and actually will look a little lopsided. 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