6 Best Tricep Exercises To Do For Huge Triceps

You’ve been cranking out curls for months on end, and you’re stunned by the fact that your arms don’t seem to have grown more than a few centimeters wider. Struggling to find answers, you finally summon the nerve to approach the most muscular guy in your gym’s weight room.

“How did you get such big arms?” you ask him. “Seriously, you’ve got some of the biggest biceps I’ve ever seen! I’ve been doing chin-ups and curls forever, and nothing I do seems to make them grow!”

The bodybuilder chuckles at the compliment, but then he extends his big right arm in front of his body and slaps the back of it with his left hand.

“If you want your arms to look bigger, you need to train your triceps,” he smiles. “Most of your arm is made up of your triceps muscles, so if you balance your arm workouts and focus as much energy on your triceps as you do on your biceps, your arms will get a lot bigger in a hurry.”

You’d been so enamored with the idea of growing the peak of your biceps that you never realized how much bigger they would look if you broadened the backsides of your arms. 

So now you head back over to your end of the weight rack with a new mission in mind and no clue how to accomplish it. You now realize that the key to huge arms is to grow your triceps. The question is, how exactly are you going to do it?

Anatomy of the Triceps Muscle

If you’re hoping to get bigger arms, you would be well served to prioritize triceps growth in addition to engaging in workouts that target your biceps.

 While your biceps are often the stars of your arms, and are the arm muscles you are most likely to flex when you want to communicate the size and strength of your arms to others, your three tricep heads collectively make up a greater percentage of your arms than your biceps. Therefore, working your way to bigger triceps is the pathway to achieving bigger arms overall.

As the name suggests, your triceps muscles comprise three heads — the long head, the lateral head, and the medial head. The long head accounts for two-thirds of the total mass of your triceps. It is framed by the lateral head, which faces outward from your body, and your medial head, which faces inward and toward your body.

The three tricep heads truly are three different muscles that respond differently when placed in similar environments. For instance, at least one study shows that the tricep muscles fatigue at different rates over the course of the tricep press down exercise, while also displaying variance in terms of their susceptibility to have their rate of fatigue altered by the speed of the exercise. (1)

To put it another way, in order to most effectively train all of the muscles of your triceps to fatigue,  the smartest approach is to focus on each muscle individually to maximize the functionality of each muscle..

Why Strong Triceps Matter

No matter how you approach the topic, strong triceps are essential if you want to have a fully functional upper body. This reasoning goes back to the theory that a chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and if you lack strength in your upper arm muscles, that means your power is likely to break down beginning in your upper arms, and then continuing onward in a sequence as each subsequent muscle group starts to break down as well.

In a real world setting, like if you’re playing a game of pick-up football and you need to block for your teammates, the failure of your triceps to maintain a position of elbow extension can cause your chest and shoulders to carry a greater share of the burden than they would like. 

Before too long, this can result in a deterioration in the quality of your entire upper body performance, so it would behoove you to work toward building stronger triceps to keep the rest of your upper body muscles protected. Similarly, in a workout setting, a lack of tricep strength can cause your arms to break down on an exercise like the bench press long before your chest does. 

While this can probably play a role in improving the strength of your triceps since they have been trained to the point of failure, it prevents you from being able to maximize the work of your chest, and can impose  limitations on your chest-training efforts.

Best Tricep Exercises for Each Muscle Head

It is quite possible to craft an impressive set of triceps simply by doing exercises that focus on other, larger muscle groups. This is especially true if you engage in compound exercises that heavily load your chest and shoulder muscles while necessitating the movement of your arms. It also doesn’t hurt if you have favorable genetics that predispose you to impressive muscle growth in your upper arms.

For those who aren’t quite as genetically gifted, one of the keys to cracking the code on tricep growth is to target the three heads of your triceps separately. That way, if you optimize for growth in each of your tricep heads individually, the outcome should be maximum strength and size when your muscles begin to work collectively once again.

Long Head

The long head of your triceps ties directly into your shoulder joint, and plays a significant role in movements that require you to extend your arms overhead. 

Because of this connection point and role, the long head of your triceps is prioritized by exercises that call for the full extension of your arms while they’re in a stretched state, or when you’re extending your arms either down and back or up and back into a state of full extension.

This feature of the triceps means that triceps kickbacks and overhead triceps extension are two of the best exercises to include in your triceps workout. Throughout a triceps kickback, the long head of your triceps is fully engaged, and is in a position that allows you to bring the weight back behind your body, while the long head of your tricep is under constant tension.

Lateral Head

The key to working the lateral head of your triceps has a great deal to do with the positioning of your hands, elbows, and shoulders during your exercises. 

Although  it is generally a good idea to keep your hands positioned at approximately shoulder width while you do tricep exercises, the more your elbow angles outward, the more inward your hands are placed. When you do this, your shoulders also rotate inward, and the lateral head of your triceps will assume a greater share of the control of the movement.

A classic example of this would be the diamond push-up — or  triceps push-up — which requires you to bring your hands closer to the center of your body. In the process, you end up with your elbows bent outward, and your lateral triceps shouldering a large degree of the burden.

A simpler example comes in the form of the tricep pushdown. By placing your hands closer together on the bar, or keeping them close together while using a rope, you place greater emphasis on the lateral head of your triceps, and help your triceps to develop a well-rounded shape.

Medial Head

In contrast to the way internal rotation works the lateral head of your triceps, you can focus on the medial head by performing tricep exercises with your palms up, and  with your hands positioned wider than usual while keeping your elbow tucked in.

The most convenient way to target the medial head of your triceps is to perform tricep pushdowns with an underhand grip, which essentially turns it into more of a tricep pulldown. In addition, the medial head of the tricep is most susceptible to changes in elevation. It is more involved in the pressing motion at all degrees of arm elevation higher than 90 degrees. (2)

In other words, while there are tried and true ways to target the medial head of your triceps by changing grips and angles, performing an exercise like skull crushers with a slight incline on the bench  is also an excellent way to increase the load felt by the medial triceps during training.

Top Tricep Exercises for Mass and Strength

There’s an old saying that before you focus on getting bigger, you should first work on getting big. The underlying logic of the idiom is that you should pour your energy into the exercises that are most likely to increase your overall size, and then focus on the fine-tuning exercises to finish things off.

When it comes to your triceps, this means that many of the most effective triceps exercises will be compound movements that primarily target larger muscle groups. These lifting techniques usually offer modifications that permit you to alter the movement pattern and place a bit more stress and emphasis on your triceps to maximize the growth therein.

Close-Grip Bench Press

To be clear, it is impossible to complete any form of a bench press workout with a full range of motion and not engage your triceps. This is because you must bend at the elbow joint to lower the bar toward your chest and extend at the same joint in order to raise the bar back to its starting point. It is impossible to complete this movement pattern without heavy involvement from your triceps muscles.

In order to focus a greater portion of the work of the bench press on your triceps, you must keep your elbows tucked in close to your sides while your hands are placed shoulder width apart on the bar. By assuming this posture, when you lower the bar to your chest and raise it up, your triceps will perform a greater percentage of the work than if you were to focus on the work of your chest.

Dips

Like the bench press, bodyweight dips are a highly effective compound movement that prompts growth in the chest and triceps. For many people, bodyweight dips are the point of your workout where you bridge from training your chest over to your triceps because of how effectively bodyweight dips train both the chest and the triceps.

Even if you are strong enough to perform bodyweight dips while your body is suspended between two parallel bars or handles, triceps dips — or bench dips — can be a highly effective way to prove your triceps with greater isolation. 

This triceps dips variation requires you to sit on one side of a weight bench with your hands shoulder width apart.  From there, you place your hands at your sides and at the edge of the weight bench, with your palms facing down.

With your legs straight out in front of you, either on the floor or resting on a separate bench, you can lower your body in a controlled manner, and use primarily the power of your triceps to press your body back to its starting position.

Diamond Push-Ups

Push-ups are one of the most valuable and functional bodyweight exercises, and the diamond push-up, which is a variation of a close-grip pushup, allows you to place greater emphasis on both your triceps and your innermost chest muscles. 

At the same time, diamond push-ups are a compound exercise that begins while your body is in a high plank position, and requires contributions from several muscle groups — most significantly from your chest —  in order to complete each rep. 

Overhead Triceps Extension

The overhead triceps extension is one of the most common exercises that people use to isolate the triceps muscle. One of the reasons it is so common is because it can be performed with relatively light weights, while your arm is in a position of power that is unlikely to break down. 

One of the great things about the overhead triceps extension is its versatility. The overhead triceps extension can be performed with one arm at a time, or with two arms simultaneously. This means that even if you only have one dumbbell in your home, the dumbbell overhead triceps extension is always an option.

In  either case, you will hold a dumbbell in your hands, and keep your arm fully extended over your head. From that position, you will keep your upper arm straight while allowing your elbow to bend, as your hand and the barbell move closer to the floor. From that position, carefully extend the weight back to its starting position.

Studies demonstrate that training the triceps at their longest muscle length during tricep extensions yields the greatest changes in tricep volume and growth. (3) Therefore, overhead tricep extensions are the most reliable tricep extension movement in terms of their ability to consistently increase tricep size.

Tricep Pushdowns

Tricep pushdowns are commonly performed with a cable pulley system, and can be performed with a rope attachment, a straight bar, an angled bar, or a handle. This is one of the most common triceps exercises, and is also one of the best triceps exercises for people of all experience levels.

One of the reasons for the popularity of the tricep pushdowns is that it doesn’t require you to handle any weight in order to get into position to do the exercise. It also allows you to quickly relieve yourself of the burden of the weight without having to worry about setting it down, or having it plummet dangerously to the ground.

Skull Crushers

Also known as a lying triceps extension, skull crushers are most commonly performed while you’re lying on your back with your hands slightly closer together than shoulder width apart while holding a barbell over your head. 

While triceps exercises using a cable and a rope attachment train your triceps to pull against resistance, lying down with a barbell in your hands trains you to push with your biceps against resistance.

From there, you bend at your elbow to carefully lower the bar toward your forehead, and then squeeze with your tricep muscles to straighten your arm and press it back to its starting position.  

Sample Tricep Workout Routine for Huge Triceps

To be clear, it is both acceptable and common to add one or more tricep exercises at the conclusion of a chest or shoulder workout if pushing exercises are involved in those workouts. This is because any exercise that involves the straightening of the arm under tension necessitates  a healthy contribution from your triceps.

For this reason, the list provided here includes a tricep workout that can either be completed at the tail end of a chest workout, or that can be completed on its own.

Even though it allows for some variance, the workout includes one compound body weight exercise, at least one compound lift from a flat bench or an incline bench, and at least one triceps exercise from a standing position, which is usually considered a requirement for an exercise to be deemed “athletic.”

The Workout

For every triceps exercise in this workout, it’s important to remember to stay within the hypertrophy rep range, which is also known as the range most conducive to building size along with strength. 

While it is possible to gain impressive size from a workout dedicated primarily to building strength, being laser-focused on your tricep training is very much in the spirit of bodybuilding. As such, you want to stay within eight to 12 reps per set in order to yield the fastest rate of triceps growth.

Close-Grip Bench Press or Triceps Pushup

The close-grip bench press and triceps pushup — which can be done as a traditional close-grip push-up or a diamond push-up — are both compound movements that place the triceps under tremendous tension as they move against resistance in concert with other muscles.

Depending on your present level of physical strength, a close-grip push-up may be out of the question, because it necessitates the preexistence of a significant level of strength in order to complete enough push-ups to reach the rep range conducive to hypertrophy. Some people may find it challenging enough simply to sustain the high plank position that begins the exercise.

In these cases, it can be advisable to superset the two exercises by completing as many close-grip push-ups as you can before immediately transitioning to close-grip bench press and completing the required number of reps.

Body Weight Dip or Triceps Dip

The body weight dip is a compound movement that requires you to use your own body weight for resistance. It can be a very challenging movement, and in the era preceding the creation of the bench press, it was the most reliable way to add mass to the chest region, especially when extra weight was added to the movement.

Because body weight dips are so challenging, the triceps dip can be substituted for this movement. Depending on the positioning of your legs and feet, you can increase or decrease the resistance of the exercise. 

Performing the exercise with legs straight and elevated on a separate weight bench is the most challenging way to do the exercise, whereas keeping your feet on the floor with your knees bent helps you to control the weight and make the exercise easier. This is important, because triceps dips can place your shoulders in a very vulnerable position, so exercise caution when performing them.

Standing Tricep Extension or Triceps Kickback

The standing tricep extension can be performed a number of ways, including while you’re holding onto a dumbbell, a pair of dumbbells, a small barbell, or a tricep rope or bar attached to a cable-pulley system.

Regardless of how this exercise is performed, the key is to activate the long head of the triceps in a relatively isolated position.

If you are one of the many people who suffers from shoulder impingement syndrome or some other shoulder-related malady, the triceps kickback may be a preferred or alternative triceps exercise that you can use to target the long head of your triceps.

The biggest challenge with performing the triceps kickback is to keep your upper arm from dipping toward the ground when you bend your elbow, and to bring the weight all the way up so that your arm is in a completely straight line at the end of the movement.

Skullcrushers or Triceps Pushdown

Skullcrushers and triceps pushdowns using a cable-pulley system are two of the best ways to work the lateral head of your triceps. The hand position of the skullcrushers — with your hands close together in a pronated grip — creates an excellent position for the arms and shoulders to rotate slightly inward, placing greater emphasis on the lateral head of the triceps.

Similarly, the triceps pushdown, whether performed with a rope or a bar, can also be an excellent way to target the lateral head of the triceps. However, in both cases, it is critical to have the muscles reach a point of contraction at a point where your hands and forearms are rotated inward in order to maximize the tension on the lateral head of the triceps.

Reverse grip bench press or Reverse Grip Tricep Pushdown/Pulldown

A reverse grip bench press is an effective way to place greater emphasis on the medial head of your triceps as long as your hand positioning is wider than normal. Using the supinated grip, you can lower the weight toward your chest and elevate it back.

The challenge with the reverse grip bench press is that the weight is often very difficult to control at the top of the movement, especially if it is a heavy weight. For most people, it is advised that they target their medial triceps through a reverse grip tricep pulldown using a handle attachment. 

By using a handle and a supinated grip, you will be able to far more easily target your medial triceps while keeping the weight controlled, and maximizing the safety of the exercise.

Tips for Maximizing Tricep Growth

There are several foolproof steps you can build into your triceps routine to ensure that you’ll soon be packing bigger triceps that will fill out your shirt sleeves. 

One of the best ways to guarantee triceps growth is to regularly perform the best triceps exercises for each of your three triceps heads, including the long head, the lateral head, and the medial head. 

By doing so, you’ll ensure that your triceps workout will enable all three heads to grow simultaneously, which means the weakness of any of the individual heads won’t be a limiting factor.

Next, you’ll want to include compound movements like the close-grip bench press and triceps dips within your triceps workout to expose your triceps to heavy loads that prompt rapid growth, and allow your triceps to work in concert with other muscle groups. 

Then you can follow these movements up with isolation exercises that allow you to place all of your focus on maximizing blood flow to your triceps. Study results demonstrate that this is the case, as tricep isolation exercises performed after barbell bench presses proved to yield greater results than triceps exercises performed after other bench press styles, like the Smith-machine bench press or dumbbell bench press. (4)

From there, no matter what exercises are included in your tricep workout, you need to make sure you’re paying close attention to your training form and bringing your arms through a full range of motion every time you complete a rep. Some triceps exercises are dependent upon a full range of motion being completed in order for the primary benefits to be achieved.

Finally, you need to ensure that all of the hard work you’re doing in the weight room isn’t being hampered by poor nutrition choices. To get the most out of your tricep workouts, you’ll want to ensure that you’re consuming substantial amounts of quality protein to accelerate muscle growth and repair.

On top of that, well-studied supplements can help you get a jump on your productivity. A pre-workout powder can help to physically and mentally prepare you to get the most out of your tricep workout. Also, a combination of recovery supplements  like creatine monohydrate and protein powder can definitely boost your gains in size and strength across all of your muscle groups, including your triceps. 

Common Mistakes in Tricep Training

You can load your triceps workouts with all of the best triceps exercises, but if you make one or more of the following mistakes, it can all be for naught. 

Before you head off to the gym ready to get down to business with your new triceps workout scribbled on a piece of paper, read this list of the common mistakes that should be avoided in order to optimize the value of your triceps workouts.

Form Errors

It is so simple to have form errors in your tricep workouts because there are so many ways for your form to break down on nearly every triceps exercise. This is due to many reasons that are specific to each exercise. 

Across tricep exercises, there are some common form flaws. One of the most frequent flaws is failing to get your elbows bent to the proper degree, or failing to extend your elbows completely on the finish. Both of these decisions shorten your range of motion and cheat your triceps out of an opportunity to build strength.

In other cases, the decision not to keep your elbows tight and tucked into your sides can cause them to flare out. This brings other muscle groups into the equation, but reduces the value of the workout to your triceps.

Overtraining

One thing that’s important to remember when considering the work of both your triceps and biceps is that both muscles are unavoidably trained to some extent whenever a workout requires you to bend or extend at the elbow.

As a result, a weekly split that includes separate days for chest, shoulder, and tricep workouts can make it very easy to overtrain your triceps, since there are three separate days when your triceps are heavily involved in your training.

This sort of pattern can cause constant microtearing of the muscle fibers in your triceps without giving them an adequate opportunity to rebuild and recover. Not only can this impede the ability of your triceps to grow, but it can ultimately result in otherwise avoidable injuries.

Neglecting Balance

While big, toned arms are certainly appealing, the reality of the situation is that you have never seen a muscular set of triceps that weren’t also attached to strong shoulders, a broad back, and a chiseled chest. 

Your body has a way of reducing its likelihood of suffering injuries. If you engage in tricep workouts and neglect to develop your shoulders, chest, and back, you will lack the physical foundation capable of supporting you in your quest to attain bigger triceps.

To put it another way, your triceps workout should be an accompaniment to workouts that target every other muscle group in your upper body, and especially those that connect with your arms at the shoulder joint. By employing this strategy, you can craft a balanced body that is truly strong and functional from head to toe.

Simple Solutions with Big Benefits

It’s important to remember that your triceps are a fairly small muscle group in the grand scheme of things. This is to your advantage, because they are involved in many different movements that target larger muscle groups, and when you isolate them to focus on triceps growth, a little goes a long way. 

This means that if you’re already in the habit of training your entire body, you can diagnose the specific ways in which you think your triceps can be improved, and then prescribe yourself a plan to maximize your upper-arm development. After all, the difference between focusing on one tricep head instead of another might be as simple as a slight twist of your wrist.

References

1. Hussain J, Sundaraj K, Subramaniam ID, Lam CK. Muscle Fatigue in the Three Heads of Triceps Brachii During Intensity and Speed Variations of Triceps Push-Down Exercise. Front Physiol. 2020 Feb 21;11:112. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2020.00112. PMID: 32153422; PMCID: PMC7047337.

2. Kholinne E, Zulkarnain RF, Sun YC, Lim S, Chun JM, Jeon IH. The different role of each head of the triceps brachii muscle in elbow extension. Acta Orthop Traumatol Turc. 2018 May;52(3):201-205. doi: 10.1016/j.aott.2018.02.005. Epub 2018 Mar 2. PMID: 29503079; PMCID: PMC6136322.

3. Maeo S, Wu Y, Huang M, Sakurai H, Kusagawa Y, Sugiyama T, Kanehisa H, Isaka T. Triceps brachii hypertrophy is substantially greater after elbow extension training performed in the overhead versus neutral arm position. Eur J Sport Sci. 2023 Jul;23(7):1240-1250. doi: 10.1080/17461391.2022.2100279. Epub 2022 Aug 11. PMID: 35819335.

4. Farias DA, Willardson JM, Paz GA, Bezerra ES, Miranda H. Maximal Strength Performance and Muscle Activation for the Bench Press and Triceps Extension Exercises Adopting Dumbbell, Barbell, and Machine Modalities Over Multiple Sets. J Strength Cond Res. 2017 Jul;31(7):1879-1887. doi: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000001651. PMID: 27669189.