The Best Long Head Triceps Exercises – Outlift (2024)

The long head of your triceps sweeps out underneath your arm, making your arms look bigger when you flex your biceps. But don’t be fooled by its prominent appearance. It’s one of those sneaky muscles that crosses multiple joints, making it more complicated to train.

Here are the best exercises for the long head of your triceps.

Triceps Long Head Anatomy

Most people are searching for the “best long head tricep exercises,” but your triceps have three heads, and the word is always written with an “s” at the end. That doesn’t matter very much, but if you understand what triceps means, it’s a little bit easier to understand what they do.

Your triceps have three heads: the lateral, medial, and long head. Lateral means side, and the lateral head of your triceps is on the side of your arms. The medial head is the one in the middle, buried underneath the other two. The long head is at the bottom, sweeping out gracefully underneath your arm. It’s called the long head because it’s the longest. It’s so long, in fact, that it crosses two joints.

How to Train the Long Head of Your Triceps

The main function of your triceps is to open your arms. Your biceps flex your arms closed, and your triceps pull your arms open. The long head has a second function, though. It also helps to stabilize your shoulder joint, pulling your arms back. That’s what makes it so tricky.

The left image shows the long head when it’s fully flexed. You don’t need to worry too much about that. The right image shows the long head when it’s fully stretched. That’s what’s important.

The best way to stimulate muscle growth is to challenge your muscles through a deep range of motion. The long head gets stretched when you lift your arms overhead, so that’s what you should look for in your triceps exercises.

The Problem with Pressing Exercises

Pressing exercises like the bench press and overhead press are good for stimulating the medial and lateral heads of your triceps. But the long head pulls your shoulders back, interfering with pressing movements, thus preventing them from fully engaging.

As we explain in this article, pressing movements (in this case, the bench press) only stimulate about half as much triceps growth as triceps extensions (in this case, skull crushers). But if you care about your long head, the situation is far more dire. Almost all of that growth is in your medial and lateral heads! The long head gets barely any stimulus at all.

The Best Exercise for the Long Head

Overhead triceps extensions work your triceps under a full stretch, making them the best exercise for targeting the long head and perhaps the best triceps exercise overall.

One of the few studies comparing different triceps exercises found that overhead extensions stimulate 40% more triceps growth than triceps pushdowns, with most of that extra muscle growth coming from the long head (study).

You can do overhead extensions with cables, dumbbells, kettlebells, a curl bar, or a barbell. Here’s Marco teaching a few different ways to do the exercise:

If you don’t have the shoulder mobility for overhead triceps extensions, try skull crushers. As we covered above, they stimulate about twice as much triceps growth as the bench press, with most of that extra growth coming from the long head.

If skull crushers hurt your elbows, any type of triceps extension is fine, including triceps pushdowns and even the infamous triceps kickback. Those exercises won’t work your triceps under as deep of a stretch, but there’s no interference at the shoulder joint, so the long head will grow just fine.

Alright, that’s it for this article. If you want a full overview of how to train your arms, check out this beginner arm workout.

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