reckonerMachine triceps extension
A seated machine that does one thing: it straightens your elbow against a stack. Nothing else is asked to help, so it is easy to learn and easy to take close to failure. It is also not the only arm position that trains the triceps, and the one trial that compared arm positions found overhead work grew the muscle more1.
Elbows on the pad, only the forearms move.
- Pattern
- Arm isolation
- Trains
- Triceps
- Kit
- Machine triceps extension
- Loading
- A weight you choose
- Reckoner prescribes
- 3 sets of 10 to 15 reps at RPE 8
- Progression step
- 5 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
Line the pivot up with your elbows
Set the seat so your elbows sit level with the machine's pivot, then rest your upper arms on the pad. If the pivot and your elbow are in different places, the pad drags your arm through a path it was not built for.
Keep the upper arms on the pad
Only the forearms move. The moment your shoulders roll forward to push, the chest and shoulders are doing work you wanted the triceps to do.
Straighten the arms, then pause
Press until the arms are straight and hold the position for a beat. Do not throw the stack into the end of the range.
Let it come back slowly
Let the handles return under control until your arms are bent and the triceps are stretched, and stop before the stack touches down. A slow return keeps the set honest, because a rep you cannot lower is a rep you did not own.
What goes wrong
Letting the shoulders do some of it
Rolling the shoulders forward and down finishes a rep, and the stack moves, so it feels like strength. What moved it was the chest and shoulders, and the triceps did a shorter set than the one you logged.
Cutting the bottom of the rep short
Stopping early keeps the arms in the easy part of the range and lets you load more. In the overhead trial the arm that stretched the triceps more grew more while using loads roughly a third lighter1, so a heavier number is not the same thing as a better set.
Treating it as your only triceps lift
The long head of the triceps crosses the shoulder, and it is lengthened more with the arm overhead than with the arm in the neutral position1. That is a reason to pair this machine with one overhead movement, not a reason to avoid it.
How Reckoner progresses this lift
Six weeks of this lift, 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 | More reps 10 → 11 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 2 | 3 x 11 | More reps 11 → 12 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 3 | 3 x 12 | More reps 12 → 13 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 4 | 3 x 13 | More reps 13 → 14 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and room left in the range, so the reps climb before the load does. |
| 5 | 3 x 14 | 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 | More reps 14 → 15 repsYou finished every set with three reps left in the tank (RPE 7) and 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
Does it matter that the arm is overhead?
In one 12 week trial, 21 adults trained one arm with the arm overhead and the other with the arm at their side on a cable. The overhead arm grew the whole triceps about 20 per cent against about 14 for the other, with lighter loads1. That was a cable, not this machine, so it says where an overhead movement can add something, not that this one does little. Reckoner's library carries a cable overhead triceps extension and an overhead dumbbell extension.
Is a machine as good as cables or dumbbells for the triceps?
For muscle size the evidence does not separate them. A meta-analysis of thirteen studies found no difference in hypertrophy between free weight and machine training, and found that strength gains were specific to the kind of test used2. Choose the one you can take hard sets on, repeatedly, without a fight with the setup.
Will Reckoner put this machine in my plan?
Not by itself, and on purpose. The engine never places this machine for you: you reach it by choosing it in a swap or in the movement picker, and a lane you have put it on keeps it. Once it is on your plan, the engine reads the sets you log on it the way it reads any other lift.
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 21 adults training one arm overhead and one arm neutral on a cable for 12 weeks, with whole triceps volume up 19.9 per cent overhead against 13.9 neutral, and the overhead arm's loads 34 to 39 per cent lower
- Haugen and colleagues, BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation, 2023. Effect of free-weight vs. machine-based strength training on maximal strength, hypertrophy and jump performance: a systematic review and meta-analysis thirteen studies and 1016 participants comparing free weight with machine training for at least six weeks, with no difference between the two in muscle hypertrophy and strength gains specific to the kind of test used