reckonerDumbbell triceps kickback
One hand and one knee on a bench, the upper arm held level beside your ribs, and a dumbbell pushed back until the elbow is straight. The lift gets harder the straighter your arm gets, so the last part of every rep is the part to own.
Upper arm still, straighten the elbow fully.
- Pattern
- Arm isolation
- Trains
- Triceps
- Kit
- Dumbbell, bench
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 10 to 15 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 1 kg once the top of the range is clean
- Skill
- Simple to learn
- Recovery cost
- Very low
- Not prescribed if you have declared
- Elbow
Muscles worked
How to do it
Brace on the bench
To work the right arm, put your left knee and left hand on a flat bench and your right foot on the floor, with your back flat and roughly level. The bench holds your torso up, so your lower back has nothing to do and your arm has all of it.
Set the upper arm and leave it there
Pick up the dumbbell and draw your elbow back until the upper arm is beside your ribs and level with your back, elbow bent to about a right angle and the bell hanging under it. That upper arm position is the lift. It does not move for the rest of the set.
Straighten the elbow all the way
Upper arm still, straighten the elbow fully, which is the cue Reckoner puts on your wrist. At the bottom the bell hangs almost straight under your elbow and barely pulls on it. At lockout your forearm is level with the floor and the same bell is at its heaviest, so the end of the range is where the set is actually hard.
Lower under control, then change sides
Let the forearm swing back down to vertical without the upper arm dropping, and start the next rep from a standstill rather than a swing. Finish the side and go straight into the other arm. Reckoner counts the left arm and the right arm together as one set.
What goes wrong
Swinging the bell up
When the bell is too heavy the upper arm drops at the bottom and swings back at the top, and momentum finishes the rep for you. It feels like a bigger kickback and it is a smaller one, because the part of the range that needed your triceps got skipped. Take a lighter bell.
Letting the upper arm hang toward the floor
If the elbow sinks below your back, your forearm never gets level at lockout, so the point where the bell is heaviest never arrives. Keep the upper arm level with your torso even if that costs you reps.
Making it your only triceps lift
Holding the upper arm back beside your body shortens the long head, the one head of the three that also moves the shoulder3. That head grew by 28.5 per cent in twelve weeks when the arm trained overhead, against 19.6 per cent for the arm trained by the side1. The kickback is worth doing. Put something overhead beside it.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, from 6 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 6 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 6 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 6 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 6 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 6 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 6 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
Is the kickback a good triceps exercise?
No published trial has trained a group on the kickback and compared it with another triceps exercise, so nobody can tell you where it ranks. What is known points one way. A review of the long term training studies found that muscles tend to grow more when the load is heavy at long lengths2, and the kickback does the opposite, loading the triceps hardest where it is shortest. The two trials that compared triceps arm positions directly do not agree: overhead training grew more in twelve weeks1, and six weeks of overhead work against press-downs found no difference4. Treat it as a way to train the triceps short, next to something that trains them long.
One arm at a time, or both together?
Either will build the muscle. Across nine pooled studies, training one limb at a time and training both produced no significant difference in muscle growth5. Reckoner prescribes the one-arm version braced on a bench because the bench holds your torso still and takes your lower back out of the lift, which leaves the upper arm free to stay where it belongs.
Reckoner is not giving me this. Why?
An elbow restriction is recorded against it, as it is against every direct arm movement, so declaring one in setup takes it out of your plan. It also needs a bench as well as a dumbbell. And it shares its group with the other triceps movements, so Reckoner can fill a triceps slot with any of them instead.
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 training one arm overhead and one by the side on a cable machine for twelve weeks, with the overhead arm gaining 28.5 per cent long head volume against 19.6 per cent and 19.9 per cent whole triceps volume against 13.9 per cent
- Pedrosa, Pereira and Kassiano, Sports Medicine International Open, 2026. The interplay between muscle length, range of motion, and exercise selection: a review a narrative review of long term training studies concluding that the greater growth seen after training at longer muscle lengths occurs when there is relevant external torque in the lengthened position
- Tiwana, Sinkler and Bordoni, StatPearls, National Library of Medicine, 2023. Anatomy, shoulder and upper limb, triceps muscle the long head originating on the scapula rather than the upper arm bone, and assisting extension of the arm at the shoulder as well as extending the elbow
- Stasinaki and colleagues, Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology, 2018. Triceps brachii muscle strength and architectural adaptations with resistance training exercises at short or long fascicle length nine novice women training one arm with press-downs and the other with overhead extensions for six weeks, with muscle thickness and strength rising similarly in both, a small older trial cited from its abstract
- Kassiano and colleagues, Sports Medicine, 2025. Comparison of muscle growth and dynamic strength adaptations induced by unilateral and bilateral resistance training: a systematic review and meta-analysis nine studies pooled, finding no significant difference in muscle growth between training one limb at a time and training both