Exercise form matters, especially if you’re in the gym a lot. Plenty of people do triceps extensions to help build up their arms, but probably over ninety percent of them are doing it “wrong” in terms of helping to avoid elbow tendon pain.
The short explanation is: keep your upper arms slightly off the vertical line while performing the exercise. This will place less stress on the tendon and more on the triceps, especially the long head.
You’ll probably need to drop the weight slightly if you use this new form, but you’ll be rewarded with better muscle contraction and be less likely to develop tendon pain as a result.
This is one of those times when seeing is easily is worth a thousand words, so I’ve put together this very short video. Click on the link below to take a look:
Correct triceps extensions – Small
Pretty self-explanatory. Honestly, if you’re young you probably won’t have an issue either way, but anyone over the age of about thirty-five should start taking a good hard look at their exercise form and cleaning it up where appropriate. And at any age, if you start feeling pain when you put your elbows on a table a day or two after doing this exercise, that’s a warning sign that you need to fix something. Don’t let exercise form complacency cost you weeks or months of lost time in rehab.