Find out what mistakes you make on arm day, and your pursuit of titanic triceps will become easier. Expert advice will help you achieve truly serious muscle growth!
It may seem that triceps training is the easiest in your program. In the end, all that is required of you is to extend your arm at the elbow joint. However, this does not mean at all that there is no place for a lot of mistakes that slow down your progress. Today we will talk about the most common triceps training mistakes. Eliminate them and you’ll be on your way to unrealistic results. Stop inhibiting the growth of the triceps and learn how to give the triceps the most effective workout!

1. Don’t Start With Easy Exercises
A typical mistake, especially for beginners who do not yet understand that not all exercises are equally useful. Beginners often start their triceps workout with a pull-up, which is a single-joint movement. The bad news is that in single-joint exercises you can’t lift a lot of weight. Unless you’re on a very specific training protocol, it’s best to start your triceps workout with a heavy multi-joint exercise.
Triceps should be trained in the same way as pectoral muscles or leg muscles. When two joints work (shoulders and elbows for triceps), you use more muscle tissue, and therefore you can lift more weight than in an isolated movement. Yes, you lose a little in the specificity of the load, but in the first exercise of the session you have a different goal – to take the maximum weight for the maximum overload.

The best multi-joint movements for triceps are weighted bench push-ups, machine push-ups, close-grip bench press, parallel bars push-ups. In the latter case, you may need a weight belt to achieve muscle failure in the hypertrophy rep range (8-12). Single-joint movements like extensions on the block can be performed during the warm-up to warm up the elbow joints, but you should not bring them to failure.

2. Don’t Forget Overhead Extensions
When planning a triceps workout, there are many exercises to choose from, but only one type of movement effectively targets a beefy, long head. It attaches to the bone above the shoulder joint, so you won’t be able to fully stretch until you raise your arms above your head. A fully stretched muscle can contract more than a muscle that has been stretched half way. This is why overhead movements should definitely be included in triceps workouts.
There are plenty of suitable exercises at your disposal, including overhead extensions with an EZ bar, dumbbells, cables, and even in the machine. It is very important here to fix the shoulders behind the head, so that the elbows look straight up and do not leave their position. Your elbows play the role of a hinge, there should not be any other movements in them.

3. Don’t let your elbows dangle
All single-joint triceps exercises have one thing in common – elbow extension. The elbows move from a position of strong flexion to a fully extended position. However, you will lose the effectiveness of the exercise if you allow your elbows to dangle from side to side.

“If there is a universal advice that applies to the technique of any exercise, then it will sound something like this. To completely isolate the muscle and minimize the influence of surrounding musculature, such as the pectoral and deltoid muscles, you need to fix the elbows as rigidly as possible, ”write Joe Webben and Jim Stoppani in their book Strong Arms and Torso. “By allowing your elbows to dangle from side to side, you, in most cases, reduce the effectiveness of the exercise.”

When doing overhead extensions, close grip bench presses, machine and parallel bar dips, or any other triceps exercise, watch your elbows and try to pull them as close to your body as possible.

4. Don’t Drop Your Elbows During Bent Over Extensions
A common mistake, even for experienced lifters. In fact, by lowering your elbow, you turn a single-joint movement on the lateral head of the triceps into a multi-joint exercise, which also involves deltas. As a result, the load on the triceps drops, as the deltoid muscles take over part of the work.

To perform this isolating movement properly, lock your elbows at your sides so that your upper arm is parallel to the floor. Using the elbow as a hinge, fully extend the arm parallel to the surface. And when you lower the dumbbells, do not let your elbows rush after them.

5. Don’t turn the block extension into a multi-joint movement.
Here is another case where a single-joint due to an error, the movement is turned into a multi-joint one. Extension should occur only in the elbow joints: the upper arms are pressed to the sides for more effective isolation of the lateral head. But if you let your elbows come off your torso during the eccentric phase—a mistake that many athletes make—you are bringing your shoulders back into motion.
Once again, we emphasize that the inclusion of any muscle group reduces the load on the triceps, so keep your elbows to your sides and fully focus on the work of the triceps.

6. Don’t shorten the range for more weight.
If your main goal is to increase working weight, you may unwittingly make another mistake. In the second point, I mentioned that the muscle is able to contract more strongly after being fully stretched. An important condition for effective stretching is to work with full amplitude, which leads to better muscle development.

In the pursuit of weight, you may not notice how you sacrificed the amplitude and began to perform partial repetitions. Partial reps are a good technique for high-intensity training, but should be used in addition to full-range movements, not in place of them.

Partial reps can often be seen in machine triceps pushups and in pulldowns if the weight used is too heavy. In this case, the eccentric phase of the movement stops shortly before the full stretch of the muscle. To solve the problem, simply reduce the load and start each exercise in a position in which the elbow joints are bent at an angle of 90 degrees.

7. Never train triceps before shoulder or chest muscles.
Unless you are on a specific training program, always train large muscle groups before small ones. Since the triceps are relatively small but critical to the pressing movement, they need to be fresh and full of energy the moment you get into serious pressing. In order to get the maximum weight in the bench press and military press, you simply do not need to train the triceps immediately before these exercises.

8. Never fully extend your elbow
Elbow extension requires full extension of the arm, but you must not lock the elbow joint, i.e. bring it to the extreme straightened states. In this case, you transfer the load from the triceps to the joints. With a large working weight and a high pace, this can result in injury.

“Locking up any joint transfers stress from the muscles to the joint tissues, which is counterproductive in terms of muscle growth,” says Guillermo Escalante, DMS, professional trainer. “This not only threatens to injure the joint, but also takes the load off the muscle, which defeats the purpose of the exercise. Take care of your joints and engage your target muscles more effectively, avoiding blockage. Instead, do the exercise with a full range of motion, but stop a moment before full extension of the joint.