How to grow your triceps
Nikola Man
Last week we talked all things quad-related and now we are back in the world of the upper body. More specifically, we will be discussing the topic of triceps hypertrophy. Since there is a ton of overlap with the article on developing your biceps, I will keep this one short and to the point.
Per usual, we start off with some anatomy:
Long head
There is only one noteworthy aspect of the long head and that is the fact that it crosses the shoulder as it originates on the scapula. As a result, it weakly contributes to shoulder extension (lifting your arm up). This is the reason why your triceps might feel a bit sore after doing back movements like rows.
Triceps exercises that are done over your head like the overhead extension or the skullcrusher target this head, but more on that below.
Lateral head
I don’t have much to say except that you should consider incorporating a push-down type of exercise if you want to target this head more preferentially.
Medial head
It is the smallest of all the main arm muscles and it won’t get any special attention in this post because it will be sufficiently developed with basically any kind of training that involves pressing for the chest. Obviously doing direct work for triceps will do the trick as well.
Time to discuss the volume concepts:
Minimum volume (MV)
Triceps is quite unique as it requires practically no work in order to maintain size. MV lies somewhere between 0 and 4 sets. You can maintain the size of your triceps by simply doing enough pressing. Some people may be genetically disadvantaged or they simply put chest and shoulders on the back burner in order to bring up other body parts and these people will need around 4 sets to maintain size. Obviously when I say 0-4 sets, I mean 0-4 sets of direct work. Your triceps will be active in practically every chest press and shoulder press, but that’s through indirect activation.
Minimum-effective volume (MEV)
While it may be possible for some to grow their triceps without direct work, most people will need to do at least 2 sets of direct work. The top end of the MEV range is around 6 sets. Here we have a range rather than a specific number because people may need different amounts of work depending on their genetics and/or training setup.
Maximum recoverable volume (MRV)
Lastly, we have the MRV which is, unsurprisingly, again a range. If you want to maximally develop your triceps, you will need to be doing anywhere between 12 and 18 sets.
Naturally, the bigger your triceps and/or the less chest and shoulder work you have and/or the weaker your genetics, the more direct work you will need to do.
So if you’re doing close to your MRV on both the chest and the front deltoid you probably will not be able to recover from a lot of direct work for your triceps. Imagine doing 20 sets of chest pressing and 3-4 sets of additional front delt pressing (military press for example), your triceps would be turned to mash if you then did 18 sets of direct work for your triceps.
Intensity and frequency
Similarly to the biceps, the triceps also benefits from heavy work, but it does not need direct heavy work because that is achieved through either chest or shoulder training or both. My recommendation is that you do all of your work in the 8-20 rep range and leave the heavy 4-6 to your bench press and military press. One minor exception is for people who have extremely stubborn triceps, to you unfortunate souls I recommend doing close grip bench press heavy as it might help break through plateaus.
Frequency recommendation is also comparable to the one made for growing biceps. You will definitely benefit from having at least two sessions. Now unlike my recommendation for biceps, I don’t think that you should be necessarily going for higher frequencies regularly because your triceps might not be able to recover due to the fact that it is active in both chest and shoulder pressing. However, if you manipulate intensity properly you could do triceps up to 4 times a week. Let me reiterate, I do not recommend going for such a high frequency, I think 2 or 3 sessions is sufficient and more likely to be optimal for the vast majority of people.
Exercise selection
I want to mention up front that you should not be looking for too much variety in your triceps training. However, you do need two different types of movement as discussed in the anatomy section. You will need an overhead movement and a push-down movement because that way you will ensure sufficient stimulus for both of the main heads of your triceps.
Without any further ado, here’s a nice list of exercises to choose from:
Please do note that this list is incomplete, there are many other exercises for you to experiment with.
Tips for making a program
Unfortunately I don’t have many tips for you here. There are two obvious tips and two slightly less obvious.
First and foremost, make sure that you are utilizing the range of motion to its fullest extent. Do exercises properly, stretch fully and contract fully. It will do wonders for your growth.
While I said that you need to make use of variety but not overdo it, I didn’t really specify much, so please consider the following recommendation - have up to 4 exercises that you keep for 2 or 3 mesocycles and then switch out some or all of them for new ones, that way you benefit from variation and progression in the most optimal way. If you have 4 exercises you can have two on one day and two on another, that makes it easy to implement with an upper/lower split or a push/pull/legs x2 split.
The first slightly less obvious piece of advice is that you should be careful when designing your program in terms of overlap. Make sure that your triceps work does not interfere with your chest and/or shoulder work and vice versa.
The second slightly less obvious tip is for people who are either intermediate or advanced lifters. You guys should have whole mesocycles devoted to a specific kind of tricep movement. For instance, you want to focus on the lateral head so you have 3 push-down type exercises and only one overhead exercise. You can spend one, two or maybe even three mesocycles doing things this way and then you can switch around and do 3 overhead exercises and only one push-down.
Other important comments
Only one important comment left and that is to go back to the post about biceps training and refresh your memory on what metabolite training is. If you’re too lazy to do that, here’s a brief summary – pumping a lot of blood into the muscles allows metabolites to build up in that muscle. This is achieved by doing a lot of work with little or no rest.
Your triceps will reap the rewards from this and it is fairly easy to set up. An awesome way to do this is through super sets and drops sets. Cable exercises are particularly conducive to drop sets as you can reduce weight by simply inserting the pin lower on the stack. Super sets are basically combinations of multiple exercises. Combinations are endless, but here are two examples:
Do a set of cable overhead extensions and once you are done immediately switch to a set of cable push-downs
Do a set of rope push-down and then immediately switch over to a set of bar skulls
Please note that doing metabolite style training is taxing and your triceps will inevitably become resistant to hypertrophy pretty quickly (3-5 weeks) so you will need to let it re-sensitize by going through a low volume phase (MV concept).