5 Most Common Triceps Training Mistakes You Need To Avoid! [Solutions]

Triceps are the biggest part of your arms covering 2/3 of the total guns (arms). Generally we would see people bursting their biceps every single day in the gym in a hope to get bigger and thicker arms. What we all as beginners generally forget is the fact that working out your triceps is equally important if not more to get bigger looking arms.

Its the biggest part of your arms and you need to allot time working upon it as it requires. Below, are the 5 most common mistakes we all do in the gym while working out with triceps. These mistakes would either not provide you with the perfect shape or you'll lake in the size later on.

So lets get started with the most common triceps training mistakes and how exactly you can fix them and start seeing results you deserve.

#1 Neglecting any of the 3 Tricep Heads

Tricep, as it's name suggest comprises of 3 parts (tri). Lateral Head, Long Head and the Medial head.

These three muscles are built in a way that they play their part in almost all the arm movements and its almost impossible to isolate them 100 percent.

Though, we can manage the stress we put on them by playing with the angles of various exercises.

This is what we are generally unaware of. We would do tons of rope pull downs, that hits our lateral part of tricep, though our medial part generally gets neglected.

I am personally a victim of it as i never really focused upon the medial part. Its vital to focus on all the three sections of the tricep.

How to hit all the three triceps heads?

Medial Section

Medial part functions on almost every tricep workout as when you stretch the arm to the fullest with underhand grip or with conventional pull movements, your medial part stretches to fullest.

The key to put most stress on your tricep is to make use of the false grip, where you put your thumb on the same side around the push down bar, this makes sure that you don't use excess for arms along the way.

Notice the false grip (thumb position on the same side as other fingers) in the picture below.

You can perform the following exercises to work on your medial head of tricep.

Close-grip bench press
Overhead extension
Skulls
Pushdown (v-bar or straight bar)
Reverse grip pushdown
Dips

Long Head

To activate long head, you can incorporate maximum overhead movements and make sure that you do full range of motion, specially in overhead tricep extensions. The fuller the movement would be, the longer and fully developed tricep is what you'll achieve.

Lateral Head

Many of us think of tricep as mainly the lateral head.  Lateral head, if developed well gives the thickness to the arm when looking from the front. It is as important as all the other tricep heads.

You can do tricep cable push downs (one arm or both together), rope push downs to activate lateral head.

As there is no particular exercise that isolate these different heads, though these variations in the exercises make difference in force that gets applied to the each head individually.

#2 Machine Vs Free Weights

Many of us rely too much on machines to perform tricep workouts. Its wise to workout the biggest chunk of your tricep first when you're the strongest and perform them with overhead EZ bar extension on bench.

Like wise, you can do close grip benchpress with maximum weights and fuller movements. Relying on compound movements with heavy weights really work.

We often see bodybuilders incorporating many similar exercises e.g V-bar push down and ropes in the same workout. As these exercises work the same lateral part, there is no point in working 8 sets (4 each) on the same part.

Its wiser to workout out heavy on the long head on the other side.

#3 Inefficient Workout Order

Its a pretty common mistake we often notice is that we would jump over to the exercises working our lateral part of tricep. Though one may argue that it might not make a difference, we need to realize that its about working efficiently.

You got to aim for fastest growth in shortest amount of time.

The idea is to work on the biggest chunk of our tricep first i.e the long head and then moving over to the lateral and medial head.

This would make sure that you have the most energy to lift heavy for the biggest part of your tricep.

Solution is to work out first with the compound movements like close grip bench press or dips.

#4 Over Training Your Triceps

As triceps easily get activate in many other workouts such as shoulders, chest days, its extremely important to split your routine between these 3 days (chest, shoulders and triceps) in a way that you get a min o 24-36 hours of rest in between.

Also, make sure you don't perform excessive sets for tricep as many people believe that as tricep being the biggest section of the arm, one needs to do more sets to build it faster. Its not that way!.


Even though triceps make up the most of the arm, its still a small muscle individually (3 sections put together makes up your tricep) and thus can easily get exhausted.

So make sure you split your days with Chest, shoulders and tricep with at least a day gap in between if not more.

#5 Lacking/Swinging Form

Form is the key in every exercise we do and we know that. In triceps, we often don't make our triceps locked up which pulls away the stress from our triceps and involves some of the shoulders too.

In push downs for lateral head, we need to fix our albows by pushing (forcing) them to remain intake with our sides and move only the later (forearm) arm to make the push down movement.

In a Nutt Shell

1- Always give priority to compound movement like close grip benchpress first over isolation exercises.

2- Make sure you incorporate free weights exercises such as free weight kickbacks, rather then performing with cables.

3- Lock up your elbows beside your body so that you only put strain on your triceps.

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