The long head is the largest of the three tricep heads, and working it effectively comes down to one principle: put your arm in a position that stretches it. Unlike the lateral and medial heads, the long head attaches to your shoulder blade, which means shoulder position matters just as much as elbow extension when you’re trying to target it.
Why the Long Head Needs Different Training
Your tricep has three heads that all merge into one tendon at the elbow. The lateral and medial heads both originate on the back of the upper arm bone (the humerus). The long head is the outlier: it originates from the bottom of the shoulder blade, specifically from a small bump called the infraglenoid tubercle. All three heads insert on the bony point of your elbow.
This shoulder blade attachment is what makes the long head unique. Because it crosses both the shoulder joint and the elbow joint, it gets stretched when your arm goes overhead or in front of your body. A muscle under stretch can generate more force and recruit more fibers during contraction. So any tricep exercise performed with your arms above your head puts the long head in a mechanically advantaged position compared to movements where your arms stay at your sides.
Best Exercises for the Long Head
Overhead Extensions
Overhead dumbbell or cable extensions are the most direct way to load the long head. The overhead position stretches the long head across the shoulder joint, forcing it to work harder through the full range of motion. You can do these with one dumbbell held in both hands, a single dumbbell in one hand, or a cable with a rope attachment. Gripping the head of a dumbbell naturally positions the arms well for this movement. The key form cue: keep your elbows as high as possible throughout the rep. Lower the weight as far behind your head as you comfortably can, then extend fully.
Incline Dumbbell Extensions
Lying back on an incline bench and performing extensions puts your arms slightly behind your torso at the bottom of the rep. This creates a similar stretch on the long head as overhead work but with more back support, which can be useful if you have shoulder mobility limitations or want to use heavier loads with less balance demand.
Cable Overhead Extensions
Using a cable machine with your back to the stack lets you perform overhead extensions with consistent tension throughout the entire range of motion. Unlike dumbbells, which lose tension at the top when gravity pulls straight down, the cable keeps the long head loaded even at full lockout. This is especially valuable for the long head because it maintains the stretch-based resistance at the bottom and keeps contraction tension at the top.
Overhead Extensions vs. Skull Crushers
Skull crushers are a popular tricep exercise, but they don’t emphasize the long head the way overhead work does. When you’re lying flat on a bench lowering a bar toward your forehead, your upper arms are roughly perpendicular to your body. The long head isn’t significantly stretched in this position. Skull crushers distribute load more evenly across all three heads, with particular emphasis on the medial and lateral heads that create the horseshoe shape on the outside of the arm.
Overhead extensions, by contrast, put more stress on the long head due to the stretched position at the bottom of each rep. If your goal is overall tricep mass, especially that inner thickness visible from behind, overhead work should take priority. That said, pairing skull crushers with overhead extensions in the same program doesn’t add much variety in terms of long head recruitment. If you’re doing overhead extensions, your second tricep movement is better spent on a pressing variation or a pushdown.
Form Details That Actually Matter
The most common mistake on overhead extensions is letting your elbows flare outward. When your elbows drift apart, the movement turns into more of a pressing motion. This shifts tension to the shoulders and increases stress on the elbow joint, which defeats the purpose. Keep your elbows tucked and your upper arms as close to vertical as possible throughout the rep.
At the bottom of each rep, you should feel a deep stretch behind your arm, near the armpit area. If you don’t feel that stretch, your elbows have probably drifted forward or you’re cutting the range of motion short. Lower the weight fully before extending. The stretched position is where the long head does its best work.
One additional detail from EMG research: forearm position can influence long head activation. A study measuring electrical activity in the tricep found that the long head showed significantly higher activation when the forearm was in a supinated position (palms facing up). This suggests that using a neutral or supinated grip on single-arm variations may slightly increase long head engagement compared to a pronated (palms-down) grip.
Sets, Reps, and Weekly Volume
The triceps may respond better to higher training volumes than other muscle groups. A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Human Kinetics found that while muscles like the quadriceps and biceps showed similar growth between moderate (12 to 20 weekly sets) and high (over 20 weekly sets) training volumes, the triceps showed significantly greater growth with higher volume. This makes the triceps somewhat unusual in their volume tolerance.
A practical starting point is 12 to 20 sets per week for your triceps total, including both direct isolation work and compound pressing movements like bench press and overhead press, which already train the triceps. If you’re already doing heavy pressing multiple times per week, you may only need 4 to 8 additional sets of direct tricep isolation, with at least half of those in an overhead position to target the long head.
Rep range matters less than effort. As long as you’re training close to failure, the long head will be recruited whether you’re doing sets of 8 or sets of 15. Proximity to failure drives motor unit recruitment regardless of the rep range. That said, overhead extensions tend to feel better in the 8 to 15 rep range for most people, since very heavy loads in the overhead position can put uncomfortable pressure on the shoulder and elbow joints.
Programming the Long Head Into Your Routine
If you train triceps twice per week, a simple approach is to include one overhead movement in each session. For example, overhead cable extensions on one day and single-arm overhead dumbbell extensions on another. This ensures the long head gets direct work at two different points in the week, which spreads your volume across more sessions for better recovery and stimulus quality.
Pair your overhead work with a compound press earlier in the workout. Bench press, close-grip bench press, or overhead press all hit the triceps hard but primarily load the lateral and medial heads. Following those with an overhead isolation exercise shifts the emphasis to the long head when the other two heads are already fatigued, which can further increase long head recruitment.
If you’re only doing one direct tricep exercise per session, make it an overhead variation. The long head makes up the most mass of the three tricep heads, and it’s the one most likely to be undertrained by compound pressing alone. Pushdowns and kickbacks have their place, but they keep your arm at your side or behind you, which doesn’t create the shoulder-flexed stretch that preferentially loads the long head.