Triceps need help

jww13

New Member
Which of these 3 exercises do you guys find most beneficial for tricep growth?

1. Close-grip bench
2. Reverse-grip bench
3. Skullcrushers

Skullcrushers definitely "feel" the best when working them (mainly due to the good stretch), but I was thinking that close-grip bench would be better because I can do more weight on it. What do you guys think?
 
If I were you I would do skullcrushers, just like you said...more stretch.  Here's a quote from Vicious from the Customizing HSt thread (which I highly recommend you take a look at) on exercise selection to help you decide for yourself though.

1) Highest priority. You choose compound movements for coverage. Although different compound exercises may be better at hitting areas than others, really that isn't your primary goal. Neither is overlap (the volume thing), which should be low-to-moderate. You want to make sure you're covering the muscles you want with exercises that you like and can properly HST with.
2) You choose isolation movements that increase stretch with load. If you don't do this (i.e. you choose tricep pushdown over skullcrushers), then you're not making enough differentiation between doing an isolation movement or simply doing more sets of the adjunct compound movement. For whatever bodyparts that you don't do add a stretch-point isolation movement, THEN you consider increasing overlap and add more compound movements from different angles or grips.
3) Lowest priority and usually optional. You choose isolation movements to increase load at contraction in order to emphasize burn. This is nice for adding hypoxic stress with a highly efficient means without wasting time or glycogen and over-fatiguing yourself. Unfortunately, most people, when adding isolation movements, do 3) instead of 2) For a bodypart, you shouldn't consider 3) until you've done 2) If you don't add isolation movement for burn for that bodypart, THEN you look into adding more sets/exercise for that part.
Thus, your exercise selection should create a trickle down effect on issues with volume, specifically # of sets/exercise and # of total exercises. Whatever the case, you should follow this order of priority with the exercise selection.
Case in point:
Shoulders. I do military press and db laterals for the delts. I'm wondering if the laterals are really unneccessary.  
This is an example of doing issue 1 (military press) but doing issue 3 (db laterals) without having done issue 2. You would either throw out DB laterals altogether or add flat/incline-bench DB laterals to emphasize stretch.
 
So according to what he said, would it be beneficial to do 1) close-grip bench for my normal sets, and then 2) skullcrushers for 1 set to stretch the muscle?

thanks
 
yes that would work. for 15's, just do the compound workout. Then when u get into the 10s and 5s bring in the stretch movements so you don't bump RBE too much during 15s.

I do:
15s
lying extensions(skull crushers)
10s
lying extensions(skull crushers) + overhead extensions with dumbells
5s
lying extensions(skull crushers) + overhead extensions with dumbells


I do both types HST style upping the weights and everything. But what you could just do a pulse/burn set with 15ish weights for the stretch movements :)
 
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