The triceps are one of the least discussed muscle groups. After all, they contribute significantly more to your overall arm size than your biceps, and they are an important muscle group in all pressing exercises. Is there a lifter out there who doesn't want bigger arms and a bigger bench press?

With this is in mind it should seem obvious that building your triceps should be a priority if you want to get bigger and stronger. The problem is that most people don't know how to train their triceps correctly. You will often see bodybuilders wasting valuable energy on things like pushdowns and kickbacks. Now, there isn't anything bad about these exercises, but the majority of your time would be much better spent on compound exercises which allow for heavy loads to be used.

In fact, you simply can't adequately stimulate all of the muscle fibers in the triceps without using some exercises which allow for heavy loads to be used. In general it is best to hit 1 or 2 heavy compound exercises and then move on to an isolation exercise to squeeze the last little bit out of your muscles.

With this in mind let's take a look at three fantastic exercises for your tris:

Close grip BB Bench Press

If this isn't the king of the triceps movements, then it is pretty close. The ability to use heavy loads due to contributions from your pecs and shoulders allows you to completely blast the triceps and force them to get bigger. While you want to work on continually getting stronger, you should never sacrifice technique for weight. With this exercise it important to keep the elbows close to your body throughout the movement in order to keep as much tension as possible on the triceps. Even with a close grip the tension can be shifted off of the triceps and put onto the elbow joint if you don't keep the elbows tucked in tight. This obviously not only diminishes your muscle growth, but can lead to elbow and wrist injuries as well.

Tricep Dips

This is the classic triceps mass builder. Dips are probably responsible for building more triceps mass than any other exercise. This is from the combination of heavy loading and targeted stimulation that they provide to the triceps. When you first start lifting you may have difficulty completing more than a couple of these, but as you progress it is important to continue adding weight by using a dumbbell between your feet or a specialized dip belt. The addition of external loading will allow you to continue to progress in this exercise once you are capable of easily handling your body weight.
As with most triceps exercises, the key to proper performance is to keep your elbows tight to the body. This means using a close grip on the dip bars. It also means that you should use an upright posture without too much forward lean. Leaning forward shifts more of the tension to the delts and pecs, which is not what we want for our purposes. Ideally you should descend into the bottom of the exercise until your upper arms were parallel with the ground. However, this may cause shoulder pain in a good percentage of lifters, and in this case you should either shorten the range of movement or discard the exercise altogether.

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