reckonerCable overhead triceps extension
The overhead extension done facing away from a pulley. It is the exact arrangement the strongest piece of triceps research was run on, and the stack keeps a load on the long head at the bottom of the movement where a dumbbell is at its lightest.
Elbows by the ears, only forearms move.
- Pattern
- Arm isolation
- Trains
- Triceps
- Kit
- Cable
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 10 to 15 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 2.5 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Some technique
- Recovery cost
- Very low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Shoulder, elbow
Muscles worked
How to do it
Set the pulley low and face away from it
Take the rope in both hands, turn away from the machine, and bring your hands up behind your head before you take a step out. Setting up facing the machine and then trying to turn under the load is how people lose a shoulder position they never had.
Take a split stance and lean in
One foot back, a slight forward lean from the hips, ribs down. The lean is what keeps the cable line behind you instead of straight up, and it is what stops the tension falling off at the top of every rep.
Elbows by the ears, only forearms move
That is the cue Reckoner puts on your wrist. Upper arms fixed beside the head and pointing forward, forearms doing the work. Nothing above the elbow moves for the whole set.
Press to a straight elbow, then let it bend back
Extend until the arms are locked out in front of your head, then let the forearms travel back down behind you until the triceps are stretched. The bottom of this movement is the whole reason to set it up this way.
What goes wrong
Standing too close to the machine
The cable ends up running almost vertically, so the resistance disappears at the top of every rep and you are left with a hard bottom and an empty finish. Walk out until you can feel the pull the whole way through.
Letting the elbows spread
Elbows flare, the rope drops behind the head in a shallower arc, and the lats and shoulders take a share. It arrives with the pin rather than with the fatigue: if the elbows will not stay narrow, the weight went up a hole too early.
Trying to match your press-down weight
Over twelve weeks of exactly this comparison, the arm training overhead handled between 34 and 39 per cent lower absolute loads than the arm training by the side, and still grew more1. The lighter number is the position working, not a step backwards.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 20 kg, run through the real engine. Nothing below was typed in: the prescription, the decision and the sentence beside it all come from the same code that writes your week.
| Week | Prescribed | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3 x 10 at 20 kg | More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 3 x 11 at 20 kg | More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 3 x 12 at 20 kg | More reps 12 → 13 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 13 at 20 kg | More reps 13 → 14 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 14 at 20 kg | Deload 40% of sets offFive weeks of building, then one week lighter. About 40% of the sets come off. The load holds and your reps stay where you earned them, so you keep the strength and lose the fatigue. |
| 6 | 2 x 14 at 20 kg | More reps 14 → 15 repsYou finished every set at RPE 7, with room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. The lighter week is over, so this is back to three sets. |
Real engine output, not an illustration. Every row was produced by running the engine itself when this page was generated.
The full rule, and why the reps move before the load does, is in how Reckoner decides to add weight.
Questions people ask
How much does the overhead position actually matter?
More than any other choice on this page. Twenty one adults trained one arm overhead and one in the neutral position on a cable machine, ten reps a set, five sets a session, twice a week for twelve weeks. The overhead arm gained 28.5 per cent long head volume against 19.6 per cent, 14.6 per cent against 10.5 per cent in the lateral and medial heads, and 19.9 per cent against 13.9 per cent across the whole triceps1. The long head is the only one of the three that crosses the shoulder2, which is why the arm position reaches it and nothing else on the machine does.
Cable or a dumbbell overhead?
Nobody has compared them, so anything definite you read on this is somebody's preference written confidently. The usual argument for the cable is that a rope behind you keeps a pull on the muscle at the top of the rep where a dumbbell's line of resistance has gone vertical, and that argument has never been tested for this movement. What has been tested is arm position, and it was tested on a cable machine1.
What does Reckoner do when this lift stalls?
It eases the pin first and lets you rebuild toward the weight that stopped moving. Only a second stall after that reset gets you an offer of something else from the group below, so a swap is the last rung rather than the first response.
Similar movements
Reckoner eases the load first when this lift stalls, and offers one of these only if it stalls again after that. A lift already as light as your kit goes has no load left to ease, so the offer comes straight away. Each of them has a page.
Sources
- Maeo and colleagues, European Journal of Sport Science, 2023. Triceps brachii hypertrophy is substantially greater after elbow extension training performed in the overhead versus neutral arm position twenty one adults, twelve weeks of cable elbow extensions with one arm overhead and one neutral, the overhead arm using 34 to 39 per cent lower absolute loads and gaining 28.5 per cent long head volume against 19.6 per cent, 14.6 against 10.5 per cent in the lateral and medial heads and 19.9 against 13.9 per cent overall
- Tiwana, Sinkler and Bordoni, StatPearls, National Library of Medicine, 2023. Anatomy, shoulder and upper limb, triceps muscle the long head alone originating on the scapula and crossing the shoulder joint, with the lateral and medial heads originating on the humerus and acting only at the elbow