An Easy Tricep Training Schedule

If you want your arms to grow you gotta train your triceps.  If you want your Bench to move, you gotta train your triceps.  It’s true that the triceps get tons of work through Benching, Overhead Pressing, Incline Pressing, etc and for a relative beginner or early intermediate trainee this might be all the stimulus that is required to get the arms to grow.  But over time, the work must become more specific, more isolated, and more focused and intentional.

The biggest mistakes I see people making with their arm training in general lies on either end of the spectrum.

Group 1 wants to train the arms directly 3 times per week or sometimes even more.  I don’t think this is productive long term strategy and I rarely see guys who are trying the super high frequency approach make much progress.  For triceps, direct training 1-2 times per week is sufficient.

Group 2 might train the triceps 1-2 times per week, but the approach his lazy and ho-hum.  The standard 3 sets of 10, not even close to failure, never tracking weights or reps…what I call clock-punching.  Putting a check in the box.  Clock punchers and box checkers never get any growth either.

When you are trying to make small muscle groups grow you must create fatigue and muscle damage.  You need to be training to failure.  You need to be varying your exercise selection, and you MUST be trying to chase rep and/or weight PRs every time you train a movement.  Training this way will require a moderate volume and a moderate frequency.  You can go high volume and you can go high frequency.  But doing so requires less intensity and less intensiveness.  Intensity being defined as load (absolute as well as relative to the rep range you want to train in) and intensiveness is basically the amount of EFFORT you put into your sets and how close you are training to failure.

Focus on quality and not quantity will yield you better results in the long term.

I honestly think that if you are doing a lot of Benching, Overhead Pressing, and variants of each exercise every week, then you can train with as little as 6 sets of direct tricep work per week and get great results, provided each of those sets is actual meaningful work.  Don’t count bullshit sets.  Work sets should generally terminate in muscular failure and create a fairly significant pump in the tricep.  There is debate on the actual significance or effectiveness of the “pump” to muscular growth.  My own personal experience as a lifter and coach is that I’ve never really seen anyone grow their arms to a significant degree without it.  At the very least the pump is an excellent indicator of how effective your sets and reps are, even if the pump itself is nothing more than a meaningless short term accumulation of blood and metabolic waste products in and around the muscle cells.

So don’t count warm up sets, work sets only.  Take every work set to failure and occasionally beyond failure.

What I generally like to do is set up two different “sessions” for the triceps per week, 2-3 days apart.  I “airquoted” sessions because these sessions are generally tacked onto the end of other upper body workouts, not necessarily given their own day.

In one of the sessions always like to include Dips.  Dips are unique because they put the shoulder joint in an extreme position of extension.  This targets the outer head of the tricep the best.  The outer head is the most visible head of the tricep from an aesthetic point of view, but it’s often described as the “lazy head” in power lifting because it’s believed to contribute the least to the Bench Press.  The only other exercise that trains the triceps with the shoulder in extension like this is the tricep kickback.  But the kickback is really pretty worthless as an extension movement though just from how the movement is loaded and for a good portion of the exercise the tricep is really not under tension.  If you were going to get into kickbacks, you’d want to do them with bands or cables rather than DBs for the continual tension……but really……just do Dips.   If you can’t do Dips, find an assisted machine, use bands for assistance, or even find a seated dip machine.  Several manufacturers make them, and many are quite good at hammering the triceps, especially for very large guys who maybe struggle with dips.  If you want to add resistance to the Dips you can do the standard way which is to add weight to a dip belt.  Or if you want to look extra hardcore you can put chains around your neck.  However, if you want to use the Dips to really overload the triceps, do your Dips against band tension.  Put one end of the band around your neck and anchor the other end to the floor.   This is superior, even to a weight belt, for added resistance to the triceps.  I generally like to place the Dips in a spot in the training schedule where they can be done relatively fresh.  So if I begin an upperbody workout with Bench Press or Overhead Presses, I might put in a “pulling” movement second (chins, pulldowns, rows, curls, etc) and then hit the Dips 3rd after the chest, delts, and triceps have had a bit of a rest.  I find that my clients can move SIGNIFICANTLY more weight for more reps after even just 10 minutes of rest from the main pressing movements.

On another day of the week I’ll program in an extension movement.  For the smaller exercises you’ll find that you need to rotate the movements out fairly frequently.  This might be every week or it might mean staying with 1 exercise for 2-4 weeks until progress halts and then rotating out to a new exercise.  I usually set up the rotation like this:

• Week 1:  Overhead Extension / French Press (w/ EZ Bar, Machine, or single dumbbell/unilateral)
• Week 2:  Lying Tricep Extenison (w/ EZ Bar or dumbbells)
• Week 3:  Cable Pressdowns

Not even counting all the different grips for the cable machine, this simple rotation basically gives you 6 variations to work through over time.  Each week the shoulder is placed in a different degree of flexion/extension and so the emphasis shifts week to week to different heads of the tricep.  You can’t really isolate any one head of the tricep from the other 3….it’s one big muscle that acts together when the elbow and shoulder are extended but the emphasis does certainly shift.  All you have to do is track your soreness patterns to confirm.  In general, the greater the amount of shoulder flexion (arms overhead) the more work you’ll place on the long head / inner head of the tricep.  As you move down the spectrum (arms out in front of you (LTEs) -> arms pinned down to sides (Pressdowns)-> arms behind you (Dips), the more you shift emphasis from inner to outer head.

Now, with whatever variations you choose to perform over the course of weeks and months…the most critical factor is that you are tracking your performances week to week and constantly trying to beat your record book.  You can beat your records via reps or weight.  So if on a given day you did 3 sets of 12 with 100 lbs on a lying tricep extension, then the next time you train this movement you need to either add some weight or add some reps.  It doens’t really matter, but something must go up all the time or you aren’t going to be growing or getting stronger.

I like to set “baseline” volume goals for each exercise to try and work towards.  So let’s say we go with 3 sets of 12 reps as a baseline for an extension exercise.  If on a given week we perform 3 sets of 12 with a given weight, then the next week/session we are going to add weight.   It’s likely the reps will fall.  Lets say in Week 1 we do 3x12x100lbs and in week 2 we do 3×12,10,9×105 lbs.  From there we will work on adding reps and not weight until we hit 3x12x105.  Then we’ll bump up in weight.  It might take several attempts to move from 3×12,10,9 to 3×12 and that’s okay.  Even if we add 1 rep on just 1 set, we are moving in the right direction.  This is how progress is made.  Do this with every exercise and in general triceps will be be trained in the 8-15 rep range.

I don’t always use a sets across type approach for triceps because they are so susceptible to fatigue.  I very often use descending sets with tricep work in order to maintain volume and get more quality work sets in closer to failure.

For instance…..if I go 3 x 12 x 100 lbs then it’s likely that the first two sets were not really close to failure at all.  Maybe only the final set was all that fatiguing.  It’s more likely you’d see me programming something like:

• 110 x 10
• 100 x 10
• 90 x 10

With all 3 of these sets taken to failure.  I can build up more fatigue and do my first work set (when I’m the most fresh) with a higher load.

You can also implement things like Borge Fagerli’s Myo-Rep system or Dante Trudel’s Rest-Pause type sets for your tricep work.  Both are very similar protocols.  I personally prefer Dante’s system, but either is effective for getting in a lot of reps in a highly fatigued state. This can be a powerful stimulus for growth.

Again, don’t get carried away with volume and frequency.  I’ve gotten the best growth from my own training and that of my clients by setting people up on an upper body split that looked like this:

Monday:

• Heavy / Max Effort Bench or Bench Variation
• Incline or DB Bench Pressing
• Rows
• Rear Delt/Side Delt/Traps
• Tricep Extenison (rotate 3-6 different movements)  3 x 8-15 (descending sets)

Thursday:

• Light / Speed Bench
• Overhead Pressing
• Chins / Pulldowns
• Dips 3 x 8-15 (rotate bands, weight belt, and/or bodyweight each week)
• Biceps

Note that on this schedule I’m trying to prioritize the triceps by allowing them to get trained in as fresh a state as possible, thereby maximizing load, and volume and frequency are quite moderate because we are focusing instead on effort, intensiveness, and beating our log books every time we train a movement.