If you go online, you’ll find a lot of different recommendations for building big triceps quickly. Many of these can be quite dangerous and potentially cause injury. Here are some of the best tricep tricks I know that are far safer and will build your muscles fast. They don’t involve heavily weighted exercises, such as kickbacks, which potentially cause injury to the elbows or dips that may cause shoulder problems.
Develop all three areas.
It’s called a tricep for a reason. There are three different sections of the tricep, the lateral, long and medial. You need to make sure all three are exercised. The long is on the upper arm on the inside and one of the more difficult ones to develop. While raising your arm may seem like a simple task, the tricep, the muscle that does it is not. It has three separate heads, so you need to develp all three heads by doing a variety of different exercises. Use multiple methods for each head to get the full development.
Use resistance bands instead of dumbbells to help avoid injury.
The elbows are susceptible to injury when using weights to develop the triceps. You can do overhead extensions, but instead of dumbbells, use resistance bands and you’ll reduce the risk of elbow injury. Resistance bands provide the most resistance when your arms are straight above you and your triceps are their strongest. When the triceps are weakest, when the elbow is bent, the bands have the least amount of tension. You’ll get a workout with less potential of injury.
Warm up thoroughly.
Warming up the areas thoroughly is one of the keys to safely working out the triceps. If you think one set of warm up set will do, do a second to be on the safe side. Push downs with an angle bar or rope are a good warmup because you can lock your elbows and focus the warm up on the triceps to make it more limber.
– Vary your routine. Do more than one routine for triceps and alternate them. One should be a less strenuous session, while the other more difficult. Don’t just vary the weights or intensity, do different exercises entirely.
– Don’t overtrain. You’ll be working on your triceps when you’re working on other areas too. Make sure you include those exercises as part of your tricep training so you insure you give them time to rest and get bigger.
– Track your training to make sure you’re making progress.
– Always check your form. That’s one advantage of working with a personal trainer or having a workout partner.