Key Points:
- The bench press works the lateral head of your triceps well – even better than tricep extensions.
- The bench press does not work the long and medial head of your triceps well – but tricep extensions do.
- Combine bench pressing with tricep extensions to work all heads of your triceps.
Does bench pressing work your triceps, or do you have to add specific tricep training for maximum muscle hypertrophy?
In another article, we examine whether lat pulldowns and rows work your biceps enough for maximum hypertrophy. In this article, we turn the spotlight on the bench press. Namely, how well it works your triceps.
If you are trying to make your arms bigger, you’d be wise to pay close attention to your triceps. The triceps muscle constitutes about 57% of your upper arm muscle mass – the biceps brachii and brachialis (located just under biceps brachii and oftentimes viewed as the same one) share the rest.1
The bench press is one of the most popular exercises you can do in a gym, and many of you probably already train it. If bench pressing work your triceps to a satisfactory level, you can save a lot of time. If it doesn’t, you might want to add some direct triceps work if large arms is your goal.
Let’s begin by taking a look at the triceps muscle.
Triceps: The Three-Headed Muscle
The triceps have three different muscle heads: the lateral, medial and long head.
The lateral and medial head originates from your upper arm, but the long head originates from your shoulder blade. All three heads then fuse together in a tendon that inserts in your elbow bone. Thus the lateral and medial head only crosses over one joint (the elbow joint) while the long head crosses over two (the elbow and the shoulder joint).
This difference in anatomy has lead to the hypothesis that different heads of the tricep needs different exercises to be trained optimally.
A newly published study finally sheds some well-needed light on this matter, and how different exercises work your triceps. What’s more, it shows us that one of the most popular upper-body exercises in the gym isn’t enough for good tricep development.
Does Bench Pressing Work Your Triceps Better Than Tricep Extensions?
In this study, the researchers recruited 50 men in the age of 18–35 years, who hadn’t lifted weights regularly for at least the last six months.2
The participants strength (1RM) in both bench press and lying barbell tricep extensions were assessed, and the cross-sectional area of their pecs as well as triceps was measured with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). What’s more, the reasearchers used the MRI to measure the individual sizes of the triceps’ three different muscle heads: the lateral, medial and long heads.
After the preliminary testing, the researchers divided the participants into four groups. The difference between the groups lay in what exercises they were to train.
The four different groups trained:
- Bench press
- Tricep extensions
- Bench press + Tricep extensions
- Tricep extensions + Bench press
The participants trained twice per week for ten weeks, with between 3–5 sets (varying over the weeks) per exercise, lifting about 80% of their 1RM until failure.
After ten weeks, they went through another round of testing, to see how the results compared.
Bench Press and Triceps Extension Works Different Tricep Heads
On a whole, they found that the triceps growth in the groups that had included tricep extensions was almost twice that of the bench press-only group.
That isn’t too surprising – earlier studies have also hinted that bench pressing works the triceps sub-optimally.
But don’t write off the bench press for tricep training before you’ve looked at the muscle growth of the individual tricep heads.
The groups including bench press in their training saw good growth in the lateral head of the triceps (that is the one you can feel on the outside of your arm), but the group only doing tricep extensions barely saw any growth at all.
On the contrary, the groups training tricep extensions saw good growth in the long head of the triceps, while the bench press-only group barely saw any.
As for the medial head, the groups training tricep extensions saw about twice the growth compared to the bench press-only group, but the bench press-only group at least saw some growth.
Thus it seems like the bench press works the lateral head of the triceps very well, but not so much the medial and long head.
The pectoralis major muscle was also assessed again. As expected, the group doing only tricep extensions didn’t see any pec growth. But more interesting is that the group that did tricep extensions before they bench pressed, had worse pec growth compared to the group that only bench pressed, or trained bench press before they did tricep extensions.
Finally, the strength gains. There was nothing really shocking here, and the groups got better at what they practiced. One thing that catches my eye is that only bench pressing seems to do more for the tricep extension 1RM than only doing tricep extensions does for the bench press 1RM.
One can note that adding in extra tricep extensions didn’t result in greater strength gains in the bench press compared to only bench pressing, at least not in 10 weeks.
Over the course of additional months or even years, I would personally guess that extra tricep work can be of use. At the very least, since bench pressing isn’t too taxing on the elbows, most people can add in some easy tricep work at the end of their workouts without taking too much of a risk of over-training.
Take-Aways on Triceps Work
This was an interesting study, that gave us several interesting insights:
- The bench press works the lateral head of the tricep effectively, but not the medial or long head.
- Lying barbell tricep extensions work the long and medial head of the tricep effectively, but not the lateral head.
- Both exercises together complement each other, working the whole tricep muscle effectively.
- Training triceps before benching hampers your pec growth, but benching before training triceps doesn’t seem to hurt the tricep growth as much. Lead with the compound lifts!
- No beneficial effect on bench press 1RM was seen from adding tricep training to bench pressing.
So, while bench pressing works the triceps to some degree, that effect seems to be focused on the lateral head. In order to work your whole triceps, you should include some tricep extensions.
Read more about arm training in the articles below:
- How to Train Your Biceps: Exercises & Workout
- How to Train Your Triceps: Exercises & Workout
- Do Lat Pulldowns and Rows Work Your Biceps?
References
- Strength & Conditioning Journal: October 2017 – Volume 39 – Issue 5 – p 33-35. Large and Small Muscles in Resistance Training: Is It Time for a Better Definition?
- J Strength Cond Res. 2020 May;34(5):1254-1263. doi: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000003550. Varying the Order of Combinations of Single- And Multi-Joint Exercises Differentially Affects Resistance Training Adaptations.
