Choose Your Triceps Exercise Adventure
The name skull crushers isn’t too enticing—I get it—but it's a great triceps-toning move, and not as scary as it sounds. While it might be a little more advanced than other dumbbell exercises targeting the triceps, with the help of Winnie Yu, CSCS, a strength and mobility coach, you should be able to do them in no time.
Skull crushers are an isolation move that really help you work your tris—a.k.a. the antagonist muscles to the biceps. While the biceps are responsible for bending and flexing the elbow, the triceps are responsible for straightening and extending it fully, says Yu. This is "an integral part of movements like picking things up, lifting things overhead, and even day to day movements you don’t think about like showering, dressing, brushing your hair, and more,” Yu says. So, you really ought to throw in some triceps exercises to give your upper body the love it deserves.
Skull crushers, also known as lying triceps extensions (a much chiller name, in my opinion), are worthy of a spot in your upper-body or triceps-specific routine. But you need to do them correctly to really crush this move and reap the benefits.
Here’s everything you need to know about the skull crusher, from proper form to how to incorporate it into your workouts.
Meet the expert: Winnie Yu, PT, DPT, CSCS, is a strength and mobility coach and physical therapist in NYC.
How To Do Skull Crushers With Proper Form
How to:
Lie on your back with knees bent and feet planted hips-width on the floor.
Hold a dumbbell in each hand with arms extended toward the ceiling, making sure wrists are directly above shoulders. Arms should be straight with a soft bend in the elbows.
Bending at the elbows, lower weights just past your temples. The upper arm should remain still, perpendicular to the floor.
Pause for one second at the bottom of the movement, then slowly lift weights and straighten arms to return to starting position. That’s 1 rep.
Form tips:
Tuck your pelvis so that you can feel your spinal segments making contact with the floor.
Focus on hinging at the elbows, versus the shoulder.
Keep your triceps steady as you bend and extend, really isolating them.
If you’re feeling unstable with two separate dumbbells, then start with one dumbbell, and hold it long-ways so that you can get a better grip and more stability.
How To Select The Right Weight
When deciding which dumbbells to use for this move, start small, says Yu. Especially if you’re new to skull crushers, you want to select something light so you can focus on nailing form first.
Newbies should start with three to seven pounds per dumbbell, while more experienced individuals may opt for 10 to 15 pounds. If your starting weight feels too light in the first few reps, complete a full set before deciding to bump up the resistance. The triceps are small, meaning they don’t require much weight to activate and tend to burn out quicker than larger muscles.
Benefits of Skull Crushers
As I've said, skull crushers are an amazing exercise to tone your triceps and build upper body strength. This move targets the three heads that make up the triceps (the medial, lateral, and long head), and hones in on strengthening the stabilizers in your elbows and shoulders.
In fitness, not only does working your triceps compliment all that work you’re putting into your biceps, but it also helps with all overhead and pushing movements (think: shoulder presses and even pushups) and stabilization of the elbow and shoulder joint, says Yu.
Common Mistakes When Performing Skull Crushers
These are the most common mistakes people make when taking on skull crushers—and how to avoid them, of course.
Overcompensating With The Back
While doing this triceps-building move, you want to make sure that you’re actually using your triceps and not relying on your back or neck to pick up some slack. To do this, make sure you keep your core stabilized and your spine flat on the ground, says Yu. “Look at the spine essentially,” she says. “It's a shoulder exercise, but it's very easy to compensate from the neck or the lower back.” Plus, having greater control over your mid-back will also allow you to move your elbows and shoulders more smoothly.
Moving Too Fast
It’s tempting to let gravity help you out with skull crushers as you lower the weights down—but that won’t let you get the full benefits (and it can also make this move a little dangerous since, well, the weights are getting pretty close to your face). The key is making sure you aren’t doing skull crushers too fast, says Yu. “Gently and slowly lower down the weight so that you have control through your elbows and shoulders, making sure that you're not just quickly letting gravity win,” she says. It’s all about moving the weight in a controlled motion, whether that’s on the way up or on the way down.
Not Stabilizing The Shoulders
It’s also important to stabilize your shoulders by activating the muscles attached to the shoulder blades while doing skull crushers, says Yu. “Even though you're extending mostly through the elbows, you want to also make sure that the muscles that support the shoulder blade are gently activated to make sure that you don't strain too much of the elbows,” she says.
Skull Crusher Variations
Depending on where you are in your weight-lifting journey, you might want to modify skull crushers to make them more or less challenging. Here’s how, according to Yu.
Making Skull Crushers More Accessible
If you’re looking to modify skull crushers to make them more beginner-friendly, you’re not alone. “The skull crusher is actually a pretty advanced movement,” says Yu. “It looks easy, but it does require a lot of shoulder and elbow stability.” In order to work your way up to crushing the skull crusher, you might want to start with a dumbbell triceps kickback. This move is a good stepping stone because it’s in a much more supported position compared to lifting overhead, says Yu. You can also try a standing triceps extension using a cable column machine with the flat bar or rope attachment, she says.
Making Skull Crushers More Challenging
If you’re looking to make skull crushers harder (you go, girl), you can a) increase the weight or b) switch up your position. Yu recommends trying skull crushers in a sitting or standing position, rather than lying on your back. The movement is pretty much the same, but lifting the dumbbell directly overhead requires a greater range of motion in your shoulders and works additional muscles like your lats and rotator cuffs, says Yu.
How To Add Skull Crushers To Your Workouts
Skull crushers make a great addition to any upper-body workout and are best added to the beginning or end of your routine. That’s because this move is pretty challenging for your triceps, so you either want to do them right after your warmup when your muscles are primed (if you’re not planning a lot of other upper-body moves that’ll use your tris, like chest presses) or as a finisher to get that final burn.
Three sets of eight to 12 reps is a sweet spot for this move, according to Yu. Start with a light weight at ten reps, and adjust weight and number of reps from there. Each time you increase the weight, scale down the reps before you work your way back up, she says.
You can also add skull crushers to a superset by pairing with another exercise that targets the opposite muscle: the biceps. Do one set of skull crushers followed immediately by, say, a hammer curl, to really maximize the upper-body burn.
As for how often to do skull crushers, that depends on your training goals and schedule. If you’re going to the gym once a week, it’s okay to do skull crushers every time, says Yu. But, if you’re strength training multiple times a week, switch up the moves you do to target your triceps to promote variability in your training, she says. (We’ve got 16 other triceps-targeting moves for you.)
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