Cable pushdown

What it is

Set a cable high and attach a bar or rope. Stand facing the machine, elbows tucked at your sides and bent, hands at about chest height.

Keeping your upper arms still, straighten your elbows to push the handle down towards your thighs. Return under control until your forearms are back at about horizontal.

The upper arms do not move. If the elbows travel, it has become a press.

What it demands

Elbow extension from triceps brachii, and nothing else.

Here is the mechanical point, and it is the same one made in the overhead extension record from the other direction.

The long head of triceps is the only one of the three that crosses the shoulder. With your arms at your sides — as here — it sits at a shortened length, and contributes less. With the arms overhead it is lengthened, and working a two-joint muscle from a lengthened position loads it differently.

So a pushdown trains the lateral and medial heads well and the long head less. It is not that the movement is poor; it is that the two are not interchangeable, and if only one is available the overhead version reaches more of the muscle.

What usually goes wrong

Elbows drifting forward and back. The defining error. Tucked and still.

Leaning over the handle to add bodyweight to the movement.

Short range at the top. Letting the forearms come back up fully is where the muscle lengthens.

Treating it as a priority. The triceps are loaded substantially in every press — see push-up and barbell overhead press. This is a supplement.

Where it sits

The most-performed triceps movement in any gym, and the one this site would put second.

That is not a criticism of it so much as a consequence of anatomy: both variations are useful, they reach the muscle differently, and the overhead one reaches more of it. Doing both is a perfectly good answer.