Rapid Triceps Growth

If you’ve been around strength training/bodybuilding for a while you have likely heard such things about triceps growth as:

“If you want big arms you should focus on your triceps”

Or…

“Triceps make up 2/3 of the arm”

While the latter is not totally accurate, the fact remains that most people focus way too much on their biceps and neglect their triceps when they want to get bigger arms.

Some might do the same amount of volume for both but we rarely place as much importance on optimizing the mind-muscle connection with the triceps as we do with the biceps. Also, we tend to keep using regular reps on triceps and while we try all kinds of training methods and tips for biceps.

Well, I’m here to break the mold! You see when I was younger, I indeed heard the previous two sayings and they stuck in my brain. So much so that for most of my lifting career, I put a much bigger emphasis on triceps than on biceps. By doing that, I learned quite a few things to make triceps training more effective.

I want to share with you one of my best yet simplest tip for maximizing triceps growth. It can be used with any DB triceps exercises and it makes them a lot more effective.

Description

This little trick to rapidly build your triceps includes two easy elements:

1. Grab the dumbbell so that your pinky finger is touching the weight plate portion of the dumbbell. This means that you will have an “offset” grip (the dumbbell is not grabbed in the centre). This is actually very important as you will see in a few moments.

2. As you extend your elbow, perform an ulnar deviation at the wrist starting from the second half of the concentric portion. To put this in simpler terms, when performing a lying DB triceps extension, for example, you would extend the wrist, trying to point the thumb towards the ceiling.

The reason for the offset grip is to increase the loading during the ulnar deviation.

This simple action greatly increases the peak contraction of the triceps, which leads to better stimulation and mind-muscle connection.

Another side benefit is strengthening of the wrists, which is important if you are bench pressing, overhead pressing, doing cleans and snatches or playing racquet sports (among others).

Demonstration

As you can see, always control the weight on the way down to better stimulate and load the triceps and control the weight on the way up, focusing on flexing the triceps instead of just moving the weight.

Variations

This technique works with every triceps exercises done with dumbbells. I’ve also used that same motion with great success when doing triceps rope press down.

– CT