To create a truly aesthetic physique that even a Greek God would be envious of, you need symmetry and balance. It’s no good having a huge chest and scrawny spaghetti arms, or a big upper body and skinny chicken legs, because that will simply make you look out of proportion. To build a proportionate and symmetric physique, you need to work on all of your major muscle groups with the same intensity and the same work ethic as the last. It’s no use favouring one body part over another because that just won’t give you the results you need. The problem however, is that many people out there do tend to favour some body parts over others, and being brutally honest, they do not look great. When training arms for example, people will often favour the biceps and will perform countless biceps curl variations, and throw a quick set of triceps in at the end if they can be bothered. The triceps is actually the muscle in the arm that is responsible for giving the arm its size, so if you want
bigger arms, work your triceps harder. It’s that simple. How can you work your triceps harder? Easy, take a look at these tips.
Work different parts of the triceps – Remember, the triceps muscle is much larger than the biceps, as it has three heads as opposed to two. Despite the triceps muscle having three different parts, people often fail to realize this and will stick with the same exercises over and over, which only targets the same area. You want to work the outer triceps head with exercises like triceps bar pushdowns, plus you want to work the inner head, with exercises like overhead rope extensions. You can also work the middle skullcrushers.
Perform different exercises – 9 times out of 10, when somebody decides to work their triceps muscle, they’ll tend to go for a rope pushdown on a high-pulley machine. Don’t get us wrong, triceps rope pushdowns are wonderful for working the triceps, but as mentioned, you need to work different parts of the muscle. Besides which, when it comes to adding size to your frame, change is always good. Try to perform a series of different exercises, including movements like: triceps dips, skullcrushers, dumbbell French presses, overhead rope extensions, close-grip bench presses, bar pushdowns, and much more. See, just look at those different exercises, and we haven’t even listed them all!
Don’t finish off your arm workout with triceps – The triceps muscle is a muscle like any other in the body, and it needs to be trained accordingly. Don’t do what most people do and simply throw a few triceps pushdowns in at the end of your arm session so that you don’t feel guilty about skipping your tris, work them hard! Instead of finishing up an arm session with triceps, why not begin with them instead? Rather than one or two exercises and a couple of sets, aim for 3 or 4 exercises, train to failure, push yourself, and perform 3 or 4 sets. Train your triceps with the same intensity as you would any other muscle group, and you’ll soon reap the rewards.
Concentrate on the contraction – When you’re working your triceps, to really get the most out of your sessions, ensure you are focussing on contracting the muscle during the eccentric part of the movement. Your triceps will only fully contract when the muscle is fully locked out, so really focus on getting a great squeeze during the contraction. Once locked out, it doesn’t matter which exercises you are doing, try to hold the contraction for a second or two, rather than trying to get as many reps as possible. You should feel a deep squeeze and slight burn, which indicates that you’re doing what you should be doing. It’ll be tough, but remember, nothing worth having in life should come easy.
