As Marvel tradition dictates, Ryan Reynolds hit the gym hard Deadpool and Wolverine—after all, he needs to fill his famous red stocking. With the movie landing in theaters this summer, his trainer has shared five exercises to make those shirt sleeves feel a little tighter.
If that’s your goal, put on a pair of best gym shoes and give these movements of Don Saladino one round. They all target your triceps, which runs along the back of your arm. And while big biceps may top many a workout wish list, the triceps are actually the larger of the two muscles, so neglect them at your peril if you want to grow your arms.
How TechRadar’s resident guinea pig gym, I decided to try every exercise. And I came away with a clear favorite.
How to do Ryan Reynold’s trainer’s five triceps exercises
- prone collection
- Close grip flexion
- Suspension Trainer Triceps Extension
- Triceps transverse extension
- Single arm overhead extension
Saladino shared these five exercises as alternative options to classics like the tricep push-down, helping you keep your workouts fresh and fun while working the muscle in new ways. Watch their videos below to see a demonstration of each of them successfully.
1. Prone collection
- Lie face down on a weight bench or other long, narrow, sturdy surface. Hold a dumbbell in each hand with your palms facing your body.
- Keeping your elbows tucked at your sides, raise your upper arms so they’re parallel to the floor and let your forearms hang vertically down.
- Extend both arms until they are parallel to the floor, then lower the weight back to the starting position.
My takeaways
Prone is a fancy way of saying “lying face down,” but comfort isn’t the priority here.
Getting into a prone position, with your chest resting on a solid surface like a weight bench, can be a helpful way to remove momentum from the equation during certain exercises.
Changing inclined rows to rows supported by the chest, for example. In the first, you simply hinge at your hips and then row a weight attached to your belly button. The latter sees you lying face down on an incline weight bench and rowing the weights up from there.
The presence of the bench means you can’t pull the weight up by moving your torso, so the targeted muscles are forced to do all the heavy lifting. The same goes for counter-prone, and the results can be humbling: I was forced down to a pair of 15-pound bells for three sets of 15.
A good tip: pause for a second at the top of each rep and squeeze your triceps to really feel the muscle contract.
2. Push closely
- Start in a high plank position with your weight spread between your hands and toes. The body should form a straight line from the head to the heels.
- Place your hands closer together (about shoulder-width apart) than you would during a normal push-up.
- Keeping your elbows locked to your sides and your core tight (Saladino sees the push-up as a “moving table”), lower your body as one until your chest is just above the floor.
- Drive between your hands to return to the starting position.
My takeaways
The push-up can be overlooked because it’s so common, but I’m a big fan of it. It’s a compound exercise without equipment that recruits the muscles of the chest, shoulders, triceps and core; it is a “moving plank” after all. Better yet, you can do it anywhere (although expect funny looks if you start doing reps at the supermarket).
This tight grip variation changes the mechanics of the movement to demand more push force from the triceps and shift the emphasis away from the chest. For an extra challenge, I tried it with a 25-pound green weight plate resting on my shoulder blades, like the shell of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, and my triceps were on fire after three sets of 8-12 repetitions
3. Triceps extension suspension trainer
- Place a suspension trainer so the handles are at about knee height.
- Stand right behind the straps with your feet together and hold a handle in each hand. The further you are from the straps, the more weight will be placed on the triceps and the more difficult the movement will be.
- Extend your arms parallel to the floor and lean forward slightly to shift your weight through your hands.
- Keeping your core tight, back flat and elbows forward, bend your arms to lower your head between the handles.
- Push through your hands to straighten your arms again and return to the starting position.
My takeaways
I love gym rings and by extension suspension shoes. When gyms were closed during lockdown, I exclusively used the former to maintain my fitness and they proved to be a fun and effective training tool.
I like this exercise because it’s an example of how you move; when people talk about “functional fitness”, that’s it. It delivers a targeted hit to the triceps, and the instability of the straps will engage the smaller stabilizing muscles in the shoulders and core.
4. Triceps transverse extension
- Lie on your back on a weight bench or on the floor. Hold a dumbbell in each hand with your arms extended toward the ceiling and palms facing your knees.
- Keeping your upper arms nearly vertical, bend both arms at the elbows to slowly lower the dumbbells toward your chest.
- Reverse this movement to return to the starting position.
My takeaways
The triceps brachii, to give the muscle its formal title, is so named because it has three heads: long, lateral, and medial. Combined, they are primarily responsible for stretching the arm at the elbow, but changing the angle of attack in triceps training can shift the emphasis between them. So it pays to switch things up with exercises like this.
This move felt different from the others on this list, proving effective even with lighter weights (a pair of 25-pound dumbbells, in my case). I felt it most in the long head of the triceps – the meaty part at the top of the arm, on the side closest to the torso.
5. Single arm overhead extension
- Place a cable machine on the closest setting to the floor and attach a rope.
- Stand in front of the machine, facing back, and grasp one end of the rope attachment with your right hand.
- Keeping your ribs low, lift your right elbow toward the ceiling so that your arm is bent and hold the rope behind your head.
- Extend your right arm overhead, then slowly lower the rope to the starting position.
My takeaways
This is my favorite of the five Saladino exercises. Coach says he likes this move because it requires a good dose of shoulder mobility as well as being a great tricep builder.
You’re working the triceps through a wide range of motion for maximum muscle activation, and I enjoyed a solid mind-muscle connection throughout the movement—in other words, I could feel my triceps working hard at as I neared the end of each series.
Note that this exercise is misleading. For the first three reps I felt like I’d picked a weight that was too light, but by the time I got close to my goal of 15 reps, my arm was shaking with enough effort to register on the Richter scale.
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