How to Build Big Triceps: The Best Exercises, Workout Plan, and Complete Guide

I see you over there doing your 9th set of concentration curls, gazing at your biceps in the mirror.

And hey, nice peak.

But you know what? Biceps might be the show muscles, but triceps are the go muscles. Yet everyone focuses on the former.

If you want your sleeves to feel tighter than my budget after buying a month’s worth of protein powder, you need to build the horseshoe.

In this guide, I’m going to break down how to do exactly that, mixing actual research with tried-and-true bro-science: tips that work, the best exercises, and the only triceps workout you need. Let’s grow.

Triceps Anatomy 101

Everyone loves peaky biceps, but the triceps make up two-thirds of your guns.

You might be surprised to learn that they are one of the biggest muscles in the upper body, generally larger than the pecs or lats.¹

If your arms aren’t up to snuff, chances are it’s not a biceps problem but a triceps deficiency.

How your triceps work matters because if you don’t know what you’re training, you won’t know how to train them. And you won’t fully understand why I picked the exercises I did when I talk about long heads this and medial heads that.

Don’t worry; I’ll keep things quick and easy, and you won’t have to sit through any textbook-style rigamarole.

But if you already have this down pat and want to jump straight to the exercises, you can:

Triceps Brachii: The Three-Headed Monster

The triceps is called the tri-ceps because it literally means the three-headed muscle in Latin. Those heads fuse into one tendon at the elbow, but start in different places.

• The long head is the big boy on the inner back of your arm. It’s the largest of the three (~50% of your triceps mass).
• The medial head is on the lower back of your arm, mostly underneath the other two. It’s smaller but gives you stability and thickness near the elbow.
• The lateral head is the outermost head. It’s the one that pops out when you flex and looks like a horseshoe when you’re lean.

Together, they straighten your arms. Your biceps bend your elbow (flexion), but your triceps extend it. Like Neapolitan ice cream: each flavor does the job on its own, but you need all three for the full experience.

However, the long head deserves a special mention, both for what it does and for how important it is for building big triceps.

It stands out because it crosses your shoulder joint, which gives it two more jobs: pulling your arm toward your body and moving it back.

That also means you only stretch it fully when your arm is overhead.

If you never do overhead triceps work, your arms might never reach their full potential, simply because the long head makes up such a big part of both your triceps and your arms in general.

The Best Exercises to Build Big Triceps

We can sit here and debate the optimal elbow angle for hours, or we can train the way that has built big triceps for the last fifty years. We don’t need to overcomplicate things.

To build massive triceps, you need to hit all three heads. Fortunately, that’s not very hard to do.

All of them fire when you extend your elbow, so pretty much any type of triceps extension will hit your entire triceps.

The lateral head responds well to pushdowns and presses, and the medial head is always working, especially when you lock out and squeeze. Shoulder position (arms overhead or by your sides) doesn’t make a huge difference for them.

So, any standard triceps training takes care of those guys.

Since the long head is the only one that crosses the shoulder joint, we have to play with arm positioning to get full development.

These exercises are my top triceps picks and cover all bases. If I had to pick four movements and stick to only them, these are the ones making the cut.

1. Close-Grip Bench Press

The close-grip bench press is a fantastic triceps mass and strength builder. It doesn’t isolate your triceps by any means, but you can move much more weight than you can with extensions. And it’s way easier to keep adding weight to a bench press over time than it is to something like a pushdown.

In a standard bench press, your pecs do the heavy lifting because of the wide leverage. When you narrow your grip, you increase the range of motion at the elbow and force the triceps to produce more of the upward force.^{2 3}

Note that “close-grip” doesn’t mean your hands should be almost touching. That’s a great way to destroy your wrists, without any benefits for your triceps. Place your hands just slightly narrower than shoulder-width apart. That’s enough.

How to Do the Close-Grip Bench Press

1. Lie on the bench, pull your shoulder blades together and down, and slightly arch your back.
2. Grip the bar narrower than in a regular bench press so that your hands are directly above your shoulders or even closer.
3. Inhale, hold your breath, and unrack the bar.
4. Lower the bar with control until it touches your chest somewhere close to the lower end of your ribcage.
5. Take another breath while in the top position, and repeat for reps.

2. Lying Triceps Extension

My favorite of all triceps exercises. I prefer barbell (straight or EZ bar) extensions, but you can use dumbbells if you prefer. I can’t prove it with studies, but I think it’s the single best mass builder for the triceps.

You get both the stretch on the long head and the sweet spot between the load of a heavy compound lift and the feel of an isolation movement. Plus, it’s easier on the elbows, and you don’t risk bonking your forehead or nose when it gets heavy.

I know this one is often called skullcrushers, but instead of lowering the bar to your forehead, I want you to lower it slightly behind your head. You keep tension on the muscle at the top of the rep instead of resting at lockout, and you get the full stretch at the bottom.

How to Do Barbell Lying Triceps Extensions

1. Lie down on a bench with your head close to the edge. Hold a barbell with a shoulder-width grip, and lift it up to straight arms over yourself.
2. Lower the barbell down behind your head. Try to keep the same distance between your elbows throughout the movement.
3. Reverse the motion and extend your arms again.
4. Repeat for reps.

3. Overhead Extension

Overhead extensions are gold for building big triceps, with an extra emphasis on the long head. In one recent study, participants built 40% more long head mass than pushdowns with the arms at the sides.⁴ You can do them with cables, a dumbbell, a barbell, or on a dedicated machine.

If I had to pick one version, I’d go with a cable overhead extension for constant tension and joint friendliness. But using a dumbbell works great, too. Barbell overhead extensions have always felt wonky to me, but your mileage may vary.

Set the pulley around waist height. It makes it much easier to get into position than setting it near the floor. I like to use a rope attachment and press forward and overhead instead of going straight vertical. It just feels nicer on my shoulders, but experiment to see which one feels best for you. It’s a tip-top triceps builder either way.

And if your elbows drift out slightly, that is totally fine as long as you feel the triceps working. Everyone’s anatomy and mobility are different, and I know plenty of lifters who can’t do textbook-perfect overhead extensions but still get great results with a natural flare.

How to Do Overhead Cable Triceps Extensions

1. Fasten a rope handle in the lower position of a cable pulley. Stand with your back against the pulley, with a slight forward lean, and hold the rope behind your head and your upper arms next to your ears.
2. Straighten your elbows until your arms are fully extended.
3. Reverse the motion by bending your arms again.
4. Repeat for reps.

4. Pushdown

The pushdown is the most popular exercise for building big triceps, and it’s easy to understand why. Not necessarily because it’s scientifically the superior exercise for triceps growth (it’s not), but because it hits the sweet spot between effectiveness, safety, setup ease, and, well, fun.

Pushdowns have a very low barrier to entry. Grab a handle and shove it toward the floor. You can do them with a rope or a bar attachment, and I say: pick the one you prefer. Or rotate.

Many lifters swear that different handle attachments drastically change which head is working. In my opinion, that’s moving into overthinking territory. If a rope lets you finish with a slightly longer range of motion and it feels better on your wrists or elbows, great. If the straight bar feels more stable so you can overload better, also great.

I couldn’t find a single rope vs. bar pushdown comparison study (EMG or hypertrophy), only a master’s thesis (not a peer-reviewed journal article), with rope pushdowns coming out a bit higher for EMG activity.⁵

I personally think (sorry for the vagueness, but it really does go back and forth) I prefer the rope (I get a better squeeze and pump) most of the time, but again: go with what you like.

How to Do Triceps Pushdowns

1. Stand one step away from the cable pulley, and grip a rope or a bar (about shoulder-width apart).
2. Pull the handle down until your upper arms are perpendicular to the floor. This is the starting position.
3. Push the handle down until your arms are fully extended.
4. With control, let the handle up again.
5. Repeat for reps.

Top Tips for Building Big Triceps

At the end of the day, your triceps don’t know if you’re using a fancy new overhead extension machine or a rusty pair of dumbbells.

However, they do know the difference between effort and dilly-dallying.

And in addition to just training hard, there are some not-so-secret secrets you can utilize in your training.

Here are my top tips for building bigger triceps, with the “this is strongly supported” stuff clearly separated from the “gym lore that often works but isn’t airtight science”.

1. Make Sure You Hit the Long Head

I’ve already talked plenty about the long head and how important it is for triceps growth, but if you skipped to the tips, here it is again:

The long head is special because it crosses your shoulder joint, and you have to include some overhead work in your triceps workout to develop it to its fullest.

That means doing at least one overhead triceps exercise as a staple in your arm training one or two times per week.

As much as I love skullcrushers (“modded” so you lower the bar down behind the head), my best easy to progress choice for most people would be overhead cable extensions with a rope or a single handle. It keeps maximum tension through the entire range of motion and can be kinder to the elbows than heavy skullcrushers.

Remember to not just stop at 90 degrees. Let the weight pull your hands deep behind your neck until you feel a nice stretch in the meat of your triceps. Pause there for a second before firing up.

2. Do Both Heavy Presses and Isolation Work

If you only do presses, your triceps will grow, but not as well as they could have. If you only do isolation, you miss out on overload and make progression difficult.

Pressing exercises, like the regular bench press or the more triceps-focused close-grip bench, are fantastic for the lateral (outer) head. More so than direct triceps extensions.

However, they are far less effective when it comes to getting the other two heads to grow.

In studies, we see significantly better muscle growth (not just activation) in the whole triceps from doing both:⁶

From a hypertrophy standpoint, you want three things:

1. Heavy compound pressing for high mechanical tension.
2. Isolation work through full elbow flexion and extension.
3. At least some work in a stretched position.

And you don’t have to include presses in your actual triceps workouts if you don’t want to. As long as you train your pecs with some kind of chest presses, you’re good.

3. Weekly Training Volume

This is where many lifters either underdose (not enough hard sets) or overdose (so much junk volume in combination with a ton of compound presses that your triceps can’t recover).

I like a starting point of around 10–15 hard sets per week that directly target the triceps for most lifters. That can include things like pushdowns, skullcrushers, overhead extensions, close-grip bench, etc.

If you’re more advanced, you might be able to handle 15–20 sets per week as long as your recovery is on point.

These numbers are supported by current research.^{7 8}

Your triceps get hit hard when you press, so if you’re benching hard twice per week, you probably don’t need 20 extra isolation sets. Make sure you count your pressing movements.

I’d count a set of pulldowns as half a set for biceps, but for triceps, probably a little less, because presses only fully involve the lateral head.

• If your strength is going up, your elbows feel good, and your arms are slowly gaining size over time, your volume is probably in the right zone.
• If you’re always sore, your elbows ache, or your presses stall, you’re likely doing too much.

4. Rep Ranges and Training to Failure

You can build big triceps with a wide range of reps, as long as you take your sets close enough to failure. Anything from below 5 to more than 30 works.^{9 10 11}

However, when you’re actually on the gym floor, I feel that different triceps exercises are better suited to different rep ranges.

• 5–8 reps: Heavy compounds like close-grip bench or weighted dips. You build muscle, and you gain more strength that you can use for heavier weights in higher rep ranges.
• 8–12 reps: Most isolation work, like skullcrushers and overhead extensions. The sweet spot between strength and pump, without the joint stress of super heavy weights.
• 12–20 reps: Because nothing feels better than finishing a triceps workout with high-rep pushdowns, squeezing the last juice out of the muscle, and pumping it full of blood.

But you don’t have to marry one rep range. Mixing it up by doing high-rep close-grip benches or really heavy pushdowns keeps things fresh.

I do feel the majority of your triceps training should be “high” reps, at least 8+. Higher reps are easier on the elbows and let you accumulate quality volume without beating up your joints, which is a big deal for long-term growth.

Also, most of your sets should end around 0–2 reps in reserve (RIR). That means you could maybe do one more rep, or at most two.

You don’t need to hit failure on every set. In fact, doing that all the time can wreck recovery, especially with elbow-heavy work like skullcrushers.

A good rule of thumb:

• Compound lifts: Stop 1–2 reps short of failure on most sets.
• Isolation exercises: Feel free to go to true failure on the last 1–2 sets.

What matters most is that your last few reps are hard. You should struggle a bit, and your reps should slow down significantly. If you finish a set of pushdowns and feel like you had five reps left, that set probably didn’t do much for growth.

5. Training Frequency

Over the decades, bodybuilders (and scientists) have argued over how many times a week you should train a muscle group for optimal growth.

Some say that if you don’t train it again as soon as muscle protein synthesis drops after a workout, you’re missing out on gains. Others point out that most people who are actually big (i.e., bodybuilders) do a bro split where they train each muscle group only once weekly. And not just those on the juice, either.

Current research suggests that any training frequency works equally well for building muscle. As long as you get the same total weekly volume of quality sets in.¹²

When it comes to building big triceps, I feel hitting them twice per week is the golden spot. You could do 20 sets in one workout, but chances are the last 5–10 of those would be of lackluster intensity.

Now, you don’t have to do two triceps workouts to train your triceps twice. If you train chest or shoulders on other days, you can count at least part of your presses toward your weekly triceps volume.

So, once on a push day, once on a dedicated arm day works great if you’re leaning more toward the bro split type of training.

6. Prioritize Your Triceps

If you want bigger triceps, train them while you’re fresh at the start of your workout. You’re stronger and more mentally focused, which means better performance and more growth stimulus.

If you train triceps last, they get your leftover energy. And if they are your weak point, giving them leftovers is not the best strategy to change that.

Where does that leave the PPL (Push/Pull/Legs) split?

Well, you do run into a mechanical issue. Your triceps become the weak link in pressing movements.

What you can do is make one Push day triceps-first and the other chest-first.

You keep the standard PPL structure, you train triceps first in one workout, and you accept that you won’t be able to bench as much that workout.

If your main training goal is triceps hypertrophy, who cares if your bench press numbers drop by 10–15% while you pursue that goal? Besides, you still have one workout where you can bench first.

The bottom line, and my point, is that if you really want to prioritize a muscle, consider training it when you can do it justice. And that is usually at the start of a workout.

7. Protect Your Elbows

High-volume, high-intensity triceps training is notoriously hard on the elbow tendons. If your elbows hurt, you can’t train heavy, and if you can’t train heavy, you won’t grow.

For example, lying triceps extensions are legendary for mass, but they’re also legendary for elbow pain. The bros call them elbow crushers for a reason.

If you feel them (or another triceps exercise) more in your elbows than in the muscle, don’t force them. Switch to an EZ bar or dumbbells, or use cables. In most cases, a simple fix like changing the angle and letting your elbows move more naturally (for you) takes care of the problem.

You can also skip heavy low-rep work for a time. Doing really high-rep sets works just fine for muscle growth and is much easier on the elbows.

The only downside is that you really have to go to failure, and that’s not pleasant once you go above 20 reps, but unlike tendinitis, it’s not bad pain.

If your elbows start acting up once you up your triceps game, you have several options. Just remember that ignoring the issue and training through the pain is not one of them.

Triceps Workout to Add Size to Your Arms

Here, I’m going to give you a triceps workout that ties everything we talked about up to this point together.

You get:

1. The heavy compound mass builder.
2. Two isolation exercises that bias the long head, one medium-heavy and one lighter.
3. One high-rep finisher for maximal pump.

Exercise	Sets	Reps	Notes
Close-Grip Bench Press	3–4	6	Tuck your elbows in tight to your ribcage as you lower the bar, and drive up explosively.
Barbell Lying Triceps Extension	3–4	8–10	Lower the bar down behind your head, not to your forehead or nose.
Overhead Cable Triceps Extension	3–4	12–15	The stretch at the bottom is more important than using as much weight as possible.
Pushdown	3–4	20	Close your eyes and feel the back of your arm contracting. If you can’t feel it, lower the weight.

Do this workout once or twice per week. It works great both as part of a dedicated arm workout or if you train your triceps with, for example, your other pushing muscles.

If you do it twice weekly, three sets per exercise is a good place to start. If you do it once, consider upping the sets to four per exercise.

Training triceps with chest is likely the most popular route, but you can combine this workout with any muscle group of your choice.

Personally, I prefer to train mine on a separate arm day (not because of superior results but because I love the feel of training biceps and triceps together), but back and triceps is also an underrated and underutilized combo.

This triceps workout is intended for intermediate-level lifters and above. If you’re a beginner, it’s likely a bit too much at the moment. You might not even need a dedicated triceps workout at this time and will likely get great results with one of our free beginner programs for building muscle:

• Beginner Barbell Program
• Beginner Strength Training Program
• Bodybuilding for Beginners

Track Your Triceps Training In StrengthLog

This is one of many free workouts in our workout log app, StrengthLog.

The app makes it super easy to keep track of your weights and reps and ensures you’re on the right path.

It remembers what weights you used in your last session and automatically loads them into your next one. And trying to improve on your last workout (progressive overload) is the number one factor for improving, building muscle, and getting stronger.

Download it and start tracking your gains today!

StrengthLog is free to use, and so is this triceps workout.

Eating for Big Triceps

Before we close this one out, let me give you a few pointers on nutrition and recovery.

It’s what you do in the gym that makes your triceps grow, but that growth can’t happen if you don’t provide the energy and nutrients your body needs.

• If your goal is to grow your arms as quickly as possible, try eating in a slight calorie surplus. Around 200 to 400 extra calories per day is a nice range to aim for. You can gain muscle without a surplus (or even while losing weight), but it becomes significantly harder, especially if you’ve been training for a while.
• Protein is the raw material for muscle growth. A practical, research-backed guideline is around 2 grams per kilogram of body weight (or about 1 gram per pound) each day.
• Carbs allow you to perform in the gym, and good workouts are what drive growth. You don’t need to carb-load like a strongman for your arm workouts, but if you feel flat or underpowered, upping your carbs, especially around your workouts, is worth trying.
• Creatine monohydrate is the supplement for anyone looking to gain muscle and strength. I recommend everyone take 5 grams per day, every day. You’ll be able to do a few more reps, which adds up over time.
• And don’t sleep on sleep. Not getting enough Zs makes muscle growth much harder, arms included. Quality sleep is one of the most powerful recovery and anabolic tools you have. I know it’s not always easy to prioritize, but do your best.

Final Rep

If you want bigger arms, stop thinking biceps and start thinking triceps.

The good thing is that your triceps aren’t different from other muscles when it comes to getting them to grow.

Focus on progressive overload, train through a full range of motion, and don’t shy away from hard sets close to failure.

Don’t overcomplicate it. Try the workout above to make things even easier. Log your workouts, track your progress, and give your triceps a reason to grow.

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Last reviewed: 2026-02-16

References

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