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2002/04/12, 10:35 PM
Here's a description of how to do it:
The starting position is lying on your back on a bench. Your head should be on the edge of the bench, so that the top of it is sort of pointing out, but without forcing you to flex your neck. Make sure that your lower back is flat to the pad. If you have short legs, you might have to place two plates under your feet to make sure you don’t get an arched back. Have your knees wide apart, so that you feel a general sense of balance in your entire body.
Have your training partner hand you the Z-curl bar. Grab it as you find comfortable, which should be about 6-8 inches apart. You may choose to use normal or “monkey grip,” i.e. thumbs on the same side as the rest of the fingers, but you better make sure that you won’t drop it! If you do, let’s say you’d experience the “Skullcrusher” in the wrong meaning of the word…
Hold the bar straight up with straight arms. Consciously tuck your scapulaes together and pull your shoulders down as far as possible (towards your waist). Keep the elbows fairly close together – between shoulder width and grip-width. Now you should have a balanced starting position.
As the descent starts, keep your upper-arms still while bending your elbows until the elbows are completely bent or until the bar touches your forehead. If you’ve trained biceps beforehand, you might be so pumped you’re experiencing a physical stop (the pumped biceps) way before reaching the forehead. If so, make a note about shifting the order of muscles to train for next time.
Keeping the elbows together, you may “slide” the bar beyond your head, and down under it as far it’ll go. You should experience a feeling of total stretch in every part of the triceps. This mid-position should be a lying-down version of having your arms raised over your head, but with bent elbows so that the forearms are hanging straight down grasping the bar.
As you start ascending, you have to learn to master the trickiest part – and where it’ll pay off the most! As you slowly raise your upper arms towards pointing upwards again, start straightening out your elbows at a controlled, but slightly faster pace. When your upper arms are about 45 degrees, or halfway up, you should be almost done with straightening out your elbows. Are you following what I try to describe? By the time the upper arms have traveled 45 degrees, right in between being parallel to the floor and pointing straight up, your elbow will have straightened out from 90 degrees to almost entirely straight. When you’ve completed the straightening of the upper arms as well, you’re ready to immediately start descending for your next rep.
By doing it this way you will hit all three heads of the Triceps (hence “Tri”), and you will also get a great stretch as opposed to the “classic” Skullcrusher, where you simply don’t move your upper arms at all throughout the entire exercise. The major danger of this exercise is that most people tend to let the elbows drift apart. When you look at the guys doing this exercise at the gym, you’ll find that more than half of them turns it into a mix of bench pressing/skullcrusher/close-grip bench press, with the elbows pointing widely apart. This puts stress on the poor little muscles in your shoulders, which is actually the only thing keeping your shoulder joint in place. It also robs you of the full effect of the exercise, even though you might be able to use more weight if you do it this way. But then again, if you use a car jack to aid you in your bench pressing, you can use a LOT more weight, but the purpose of putting a specific, targeted muscle to work is kinda defeated.
Hope this helps...
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**_Robert_**
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