No arm workout is complete without a few exercises for triceps, but that doesn’t mean you need to leave your sweaty prints on every piece of iron in the weight room. In fact, according to top trainers, you can maximize your triceps growth with a lot less work than you probably thought—and anything more could actually be adding unnecessary recovery time and muscle soreness.
“For the triceps, I wouldn’t recommend doing more than three exercises,” says Antony Brown, personal training leader at Life Time in Lake Zurich, Illinois. “Anything on top of that is going to be junk volume”—that is, excess reps that ultimately do nothing to help you build muscle.
Unlike a shoulder workout, where you’ll want to pick specific exercises to target each head of the deltoid, the triceps is more of a package deal. “All three heads of the triceps do literally the exact same thing,” says Luke Carlson, founder and CEO of personal training studio Discover Strength. “We just don’t have consistent evidence that says one exercise targets this head more than the other, whereas with the shoulder we absolutely do.”
So, why not just do one triceps exercise and call it a day? “The answer is, performing multi- and single-joint [exercises in the same workout] produces more hypertrophy,” Carlson says. And adding a third exercise—specifically, one using a machine—offers valuable muscle-building benefits that you simply can’t get from free weights.
So, sit back, forget everything you thought you knew about training your triceps, and behold your new (far, far more efficient) triceps exercise rotation.
French Press
“The triceps grow more in what’s called a lengthened position,” says Carlson. In other words, you want to hit the muscle when it is at its longest. And since the triceps is a biarticulate muscle, meaning it crosses over two joints (in this case, the elbow and the shoulder), “the most lengthened position for the triceps would be the behind the head,” he says. “As long as that arm is up above our head, and the dumbbell is coming as far down as possible, and our elbow is as bent as possible, we are truly maximizing that lengthened position.”