Do you want bulging arm muscles that can rip the sleeves off your shirt? Or are you just tired of asking your partner to open the pickle jar? You may have heard the term eccentrics, or negatives, in strength training. They are a type of training that focuses on the lengthening of a muscle group and are the key to strengthening your muscles like never before.

While traditional triceps extensions work through a full range of motion, eccentric triceps extensions focus only on the lowering part of the exercise.

Eccentric exercises like these are well known for effectively strengthening surrounding muscle groups and providing overload stimulus, improving body awareness and the robustness of nearby tissues.

What Are Eccentric Tricep Extensions?

Eccentric triceps extensions are a variation of triceps extensions. They focus on the upward motion of an exercise, where the muscle lengthens through the contraction. In comparison, traditional triceps extensions are an isolation exercise that is only loaded by what the triceps can handle concentrically, even though there are both concentric and eccentric muscle actions.

Benefits Of Eccentric Tricep Extensions

Building your triceps is a necessary part of having strong arms, as they run from your shoulder to your elbow joint through the back of your arms. Acting as a bridge between your arms and the rest of your upper body, training your triceps will give you more strength, stability, and a better range of motion. This helps with everyday movements such as carrying and pushing.

Eccentric triceps extensions provide an overload stimulus as the muscle produces more force at a lower energy cost during its lengthening during the eccentric phase of the movement. Therefore, when performing eccentrics, the body can produce more force than traditional training.

Teaching your body how to contract during eccentrics, especially when using heavier weights, improves the mind-muscle connection substantially. When increasing the time under tension and slowing the tempo, your body has more practice loading eccentrically, which can carry over to other activities. However, this is considered tempo training rather than eccentric training.

Eccentric triceps extensions also strengthen surrounding tendons and ligaments. This is because steadily loading the joints with heavy weights can improve the integrity of the tendons, helping them adapt to hold heavier loads.

Eccentric Tricep Extension Variations

Flywheel Delayed Braking Action Seated Overhead Tricep Extension

The delayed braking action method with the flywheel is how to eccentrically overload the triceps when using isolation exercises. As the eccentric load is matched to the concentric effort, concentrating the reversal of eccentric to concentric to a small portion of the end range of movement will overload the eccentric. Here’s how:

• Sit on the Exerfly Portable or the bench on the Exerfly platform. Adjust the rope, so the end range is with your arms straight overhead with the rope behind you.
• Perform a couple of reps to get the flywheel moving. Once you perform a maximal concentric overhead extension, ride the eccentric phase to halfway before rapidly putting on the brakes to reverse the movement to a concentric action.

Movement Concentric Overload Flywheel Rack Mount Tricep Extension

For this method, you will need the Exerfly Rack Mount. It can be tricky, but if eccentrically loading the triceps is the goal, it’s worth doing. Overloading the concentric portion involves using the entire body to pull the handle down and only allowing the elbows to move during the eccentric. Here's how:

• Set the Exerfly Rack Mount near the top of the rack as you would for traditional triceps extensions.
• Instead of performing a strict triceps extension, use your entire body like you would use a ski erg.
• Do 2 reps like this to accelerate the flywheel, then perform a strict, eccentric action where only the elbows move to isolate the triceps.

Summary

Eccentric triceps extensions are a great variation to incorporate into your upper body workout. Apart from strengthening and improving your arms, they also minimize the risk of injury from dealing with heavier loads. Next time you’re working out, try incorporating this exercise into your routine and watch the build and shape of your upper posterior arm muscles transform.