Fit Over 50 - Tricepts

Margie Weiss: Hi! I am Margie Weiss. This video is how to stay fit over 50. And the section we are doing now is for the triceps, the back of the arm. Christina is going to start with her arm overhead. The sitting position that she wants to be in is belly contracted towards your backbone so engage your ab muscles, tighten your glutes just a little bit so you feel like you are lifting slightly up off of your rear end when you sit so that your body is very vertical. We want to have the elbow as close to the ear as your flexibility will allow and the triceps has three parts. So we are going to do three different exercises. This is basically a tricep extension, she is going diagonally from her elbow to the other shoulder, trying to keep this elbow as close to the ear as possible. If the elbow comes way out in here, you are doing a lot of shoulder work and not so much tricep. So you want to keep it in nice and close, and you can extend straight to the ceiling as you do it. You breathe out on the rise because you are going against gravity, and you breathe in on the drop. You can change that hand position and get a slightly different part of the tricep by rotating, feels like you are putting a hat on, or a flat head down and come up. Little bit harder to do in that position. And the third position that you can do with one hand is to go directly back to the same shoulder. That one has a little full range of motion again depending on your flexibility. If you have a spotter, if you have a trainer you can always have the trainer hold the hand to the elbow and to the shoulder to keep it in position, so that it keeps it really slow. Notice that she is doing smooth and slow. You don't want to jerk and throw the weights around. You want to control it all the way down and all the way up, so that you get a full range of motion. If you want to do two hands instead of one because your weight is a little heavier, you feel more comfortable doing that, you can always put your hands, fingers up and just grab the weight. In that way you go over the head and drop the weight straight back down and push it straight up for the ceiling. Doesn't get the variety that the one hand exercise does but it is real effective main tricep exercise. You don't have to be too afraid of getting straight up towards the ceiling because you are going against gravity. So it's not likely that your elbows will hyper extend unless you have really hyper extended elbows naturally which most people don't.

But again squeezing the elbows in as you do it. Now if over the head isn't an option or it bothers your back, you can do triceps leaning over. So she can stay in that same position sitting and with her elbow bent she can kick the arm back. And so she has it in one arm, generally one arm is better than two at the same time. And your elbow is a hinge and so you want to extend to straight and then drop it back down to an L. You have as much work on the way down as you do on the way up. So you don't want to let it get thrown to the floor or let gravity do the work. You want to resist gravity as you go up and down. Shoulder is in it's place, belly is in tight. She has got her hands in a hammer grip, we can do those three positions. She can turn her palm towards the back an do that extension. Also it is going to get a little bit relaxed like we talked about before in the back track. She can also rotate it in so that her palm is to the front and kick it out. Generally it is a little bit harder because you run into your own legs. So you kind of diagonal your hand out, just a bit so again the three different positions you can do leaning over or you can so sitting up. From here we have done areas of the body. We are going to move to the main core of the body, the abs. Without your core strength all of the exercises that we have done are going to be ineffective or can be dangerous. You got to have a strong core not only to do exercises with the arms and legs but also for general posture and for safety of the back.