If you don't compete in athletics, you're not probably working out mostly to increase the size and strength of your triceps. There is no competition lift that is similar to max effort triceps extensions. This does not mean that your triceps are not vital to your workout routine. If you want to be able to press heavy weight, you need strong, well-developed triceps, whether you're a competitive strength athlete or you just enjoy an occasional bench pressing session on your lunch break.
Why? Shoulders, chest, and triceps are the meat and potatoes of the strength game The triceps muscles help you with all of the upper body lifts that you see in powerlifting, strongman, weightlifting, and your average Tuesday in the gym. Shoulders, chest, and triceps are the main focus of strength training. If you want to improve your bench press and overhead pressing abilities, as well as increase the size of your arms, then you need to focus on your triceps.
You can improve your triceps lockout by doing more isolation training. You’ll also give your arms some serious sleeve-busting status. The dumbbell skull crusher is an effective triceps isolation move that will help build your arm and shoulder muscles at the same time.
How to Do the Dumbbell Skull Crusher
You will need a pair of dumbbells to perform the dumbbell skull crusher. This exercise is performed either on a training bench or on the floor. The bench version increases the movement's range of motion.
Step 1 — Get Into Position
Grab a pair of dumbbells, one in each hand. Lie down on your back on a bench. Push the weights up so they are over your face instead of just above your shoulders.
If you start with your arms slightly back (close to your face rather than at a perfect 90 degree angle with the ground), you place tension on your triceps, even in the top position.
Step 2 — Lower the Weights
Bend your elbows to lower the dumbbells to the sides of your face or the outer edges of your forehead without letting them flare outwards. The only joint that should move is your elbows. Lower the weights as low as you can go. The further you bend your elbows, the more you stretch your triceps.
As you bend your elbows, keep them back. Do not allow them to move closer to your chest.
Step 3 — Extend the Weights Upwards
Extend your elbows. Push your hands upwards to the start position. Don't let your elbows drop too low when you do this move, or it will turn into a chest press.
Be careful not to bring the dumbbells back over your shoulders. Keep your elbows extended and your hands over your face. This will ensure that your triceps are always tense.
Benefits of the Dumbbell Skull Crusher
The skull crusher is a great exercise to build triceps strength, increase the size of your arms, and help with overall triceps development for presses. No matter what your goals, you’ll likely find a good reason to work on your triceps.
Build More Triceps Muscle
Your triceps muscles get a lot of training volume from overhead presses and benching. Your triceps are likely to become a limiting factor in compound lifts because they are smaller and less directly targeted. This means that you are unlikely to reach your maximum growth potential if you only use presses.
You can increase the intensity of your triceps workouts by adding in more exercises that focus on isolating the triceps muscle, rather than exercises that also work the shoulders. This will help you to avoid any stress or injury to the shoulders that can come from lifting heavy weights. If you focus on training your triceps, you will see results in the form of your shirt sleeves stretching. This is because you will have added volume to your triceps without putting stress on your shoulders.
Improve Lockout Strength
If you are not seeing the results you want with your bench or overhead presses, it might be due to poor lockout strength. To perform any pressing move correctly, you need to have strong triceps. You cannot fully extend your arms without calf muscles.
But the skull crusher exercise strengthens your triceps directly, without adding stress to your shoulders and chest. Use it to build strength for when you are locked out. This will help improve your performance on heavy pressing movements like the bench press and overhead lifts.
Promote Elbow Health
Your elbows take a lot of abuse from everyday activities and weightlifting. You may find the skull crusher uncomfortable if you already experience elbow pain. One way to reduce the discomfort of bicep curls is to use dumbbells instead of a curl bar or barbell. This allows you to adjust your arms according to your own limb length and needs. In other words, if the move is painful in any way, it is probably not the right move for you.
However, dumbbell skull crushers can actually help make your elbow joints healthier for folks who don’t experience discomfort or pain from the movement. If you strengthen your connective tissues, they will be better able to handle heavy loads and excessive use. Training with higher reps can help increase blood flow to muscles and connective tissues.
Muscles Worked by the Dumbbell Skull Crusher
The dumbbell skull crusher is a triceps isolation exercise. This one is really targeting your triceps in a big way. If you feel the exercise in any other part of your body than the working muscle, this may be a sign that you are not doing the single-joint movement correctly.
Triceps
There are three different heads to your triceps- lateral, medial, and inner. The skull crusher is a great exercise for developing your medial and lateral heads. The skull crusher targets the triceps, the muscles responsible for extending the elbow. You'll also be targeting your triceps long head, which is especially important for building tricep size.
Who Should Do the Dumbbell Skull Crusher
The skull crusher is a great triceps exercise, like other exercises such as triceps kickbacks, pushdowns, and overhead extensions. The following text will discuss the benefits of the dumbbell skull crushers for different groups of people.
Strength Athletes
Competitive athletes need to be able to apply a lot of force. The above mentioned groups all need strong triceps and healthy shoulders to execute heavy lifts.
Doing isolation exercises for your triceps in addition to compound pressing moves can help you increase muscle mass, strength, and improve joint stability. All of these factors contribute to making overhead lifts stronger – and increasing the maximum weight that can be lifted.
Regular Gymgoers
Everyone can benefit from dumbbell skull crushers, not just competitive lifters. This move can also be used by regular gymgoers to increase arm size, triceps strength, and muscle mass. Although you may only train a few times per week, it is important to focus on compound movements to build muscle effectively. If you improve your skills at these moves, you can add single-joint exercises like skull crushers to help improve weaker muscles or focus on areas where you want to grow more.
Dumbbell Skull Crusher Sets and Reps
The triceps are often indirectly trained with heavy loads. If you want to see changes in your body from doing skull crushers, then you need to be careful about how much weight you are lifting and how many repetitions you do.
To Build Strength
If you want to build strength with the dumbbell skull crusher, you should train with heavier loads in the five to 10 rep range for three to six sets.
You should be cautious when strength training with single-joint movements because you could overtax the muscles surrounding the tendons, ligaments, and joints. If you do it correctly, you can develop strength and size in your triceps by doing repetitions with heavy weights and controlling the speed.
To Build Muscle
The dumbbell skull crusher can help you build muscle if you do 8-15 repetitions for 3-6 sets. You should use weights that are heavy enough to challenge you, and try to reach failure with your sets.
If you are already doing a lot of heavy lifting in your workout plan, you can try to do less weight but more reps (15 to 25) to improve muscle and endurance.
How to do skull crushers with the proper form
- Load a moderate amount of weight onto an EZ bar.
- Grab the bar just inside shoulder-width and then lie back on a weight bench.
- Press the bar up so that it's directly over your face.
- Extend your shoulders back so that the bar is now in line with the end of the bench rather than with your head.
- Lower the bar behind the bench by simultaneously breaking at your elbows and moving your shoulders backward.
- Lower the bar until you feel an intense stretch in the long head of your triceps (your forearms and biceps should make firm contact in the stretched position).
- Reverse the motion by extending your elbows and moving your shoulders forward to their original starting position.
- Repeat for 3-5 sets of 10-20 reps.
What muscles do skull crushers work?
The skull crusher exercise exclusively works the triceps brachii to promote growth and strength. Even though the abdominal muscles help to keep the core stable, they are not being used very much.
The latissimus dorsi muscles are also active during the skullcrusher, because the exercise includes shoulder extension. Even though the long head of the triceps is doing most of the work in this exercise, the lats aren't the main muscle group being used.
Skull crusher mistakes
If you don't use the proper form when doing skull crushers, you could ruin your elbows. To avoid injury and gain muscle mass at an optimal rate, avoid these five mistakes when doing the skull crusher workout.
Lowering the bar to your head
Although this exercise is commonly given an ominous name, you shouldn't lower the bar to any part of your head or body.
If you bring the bar too close to your face during a lift, you could injure yourself. This is because the bar could crush your nose or forehead, and it would also put a lot of stress on your elbow joints.
If you lower the bar too close to your face, it will limit how far you can move it and make it harder to work your triceps, which will lead to less muscle growth.
As if all that wasn't menacing enough, you're also failing to stretch the long head of your triceps optimally when you lower the bar to your nose rather than behind your head, or, ideally, behind the bench.
Not controlling the descent
You can't crush your forehead now that you're using the optimal bar path.
There is some truth to the assumption that you can't hurt your head if the bar doesn't touch it. However, if you don't control the descent of the skullcrusher, you're still asking for elbow pain.
If you aggressively drop the bar during the negative portion of the repetition, you will lift heavier weights. However, this also robs your triceps of tension and shifts that force onto your elbow joints and connective tissue structures.
Dumbbell Skull Crusher Variations
If you want to change things up and get additional benefits from your exercises, try changing your angles or equipment. There are many different ways that you can change up your dumbbell skull crusher routine to make it more effective. By doing this, you will be able to get better results from your workouts.
Incline Bench Dumbbell Skull Crushers
The incline bench dumbbell skull crusher is a variation of the dumbbell skull crusher that is done on an incline bench.
Dumbbell Floor Skull Crushers
You don't need a bench to do the dumbbell skull crusher – you can just do it on the floor. Increasing the range of motion is not always associated with increased muscle mass. Partial range of motion moves can also make you stronger.
If you want to be able to lift more weight and have more control over the movement, you should try to reduce your range of motion. Additionally, the limited range of motion may be beneficial if you find skull crushers difficult to do.
Doing the move with one dumbbell instead of two might make it more user-friendly. Grab the weight at both ends with your palms facing in. This way, the weight will act like a small barbell with a grip in the middle, so your elbows will be closer to your body.
Dumbbell Skull Crushers with Bands
To perform the dumbbell skull crusher with resistance bands, you take a single band and hold it in your hand (one hand has each end). Then you’ll grasp the dumbbell handles.
The band should be positioned in the middle of your body, under the bench or anchor point, so that when you extend your hands upwards, the band is under tension. This adjustment will add accommodating resistance to the move.
The band will make the top of the movement harder, where it would be easier without the band. The tension on your triceps will be more even throughout the whole lift, rather than getting stronger at the bottom and then weakening at the top. If you add resistance throughout the range of motion, you will increase the amount of time your muscles are under tension, and this will lead to more muscle growth.
