The Most Effective Exercise for your Triceps
When it comes to muscles most of the guys focus a lot on their arms. It is understandable as the arms are the muscles, which are most visible. We understand that it is the overall development of the body, which provides best results; however big legs and thick back are most of the times hidden inside our clothes. It is mostly our arms that are most of the times visible. People do not really appreciate big legs but everybody appreciates those big guns bulging out of a half sleeve T-shirt.
When we talk about arms, most of us focus on the biceps, just because make the front part of our arms. However if you want big arms, you need to worry more about your triceps rather than biceps. Triceps constitute the majority of your arms, forming two thirds of it. Therefore targeting your triceps is very crucial if bigger arms are your main fitness goal.
So how can you build bigger triceps? As with any other muscle, to build bigger triceps we need to make them perform hard work. The triceps’ main function is in extending our arms. In simple terms, we use our triceps in straightening our arms when it is bent. There are a lot of exercises targeting the triceps, which make use of this movement. Exercises such as tricep extensions, triceps pull downs, skull crushers and many other exercises make use of this movement to target the triceps. These are great exercises to target the triceps, however I will not consider them the best.
In my opinion a great exercises is the one, which provides benefits no only in terms of targeting a particular muscle groups, but is also functional by nature. An exercise is considered functional if it helps you in performing your daily tasks better. The exercises mentioned above are isolation exercises, which target just the triceps. They just help us in improving our arm extension. However we barely ever perform a movement, which just involves extending our arm, while performing our daily tasks.
This brings us to the movement of pushing. Pushing is a functional movement as we push objects a lot often as part of our daily tasks. Whenever we perform the pushing movement, we also extend our arms and therefore make use of our triceps. This means that in all the pushing exercises we will be targeting our triceps. The best exercise for your triceps therefore is a pushing exercise. There are various pushing exercises that one can perform. Top exercises for pushing include Push-ups, Bench Press, Shoulder Press and Dips. All these exercises are great for targeting your triceps. However there are certain versions, which are optimal for triceps.
A pushing movement is a compound movement, which means that it makes use of multiple muscle groups. While pushing an object you make use of your chest, shoulders and triceps. Depending on the way you push an object you will put the emphasis on a particular muscle group. If you want to put the emphasis on your triceps while pushing, you need to keep your palms close to one another. Therefore close hand push-ups, narrow grip bench press are the exercises, which shift the emphasis more on the triceps over the chest and shoulders. Similarly for tricep dips the separation between the parallel bars has to be decreased in order to make is more effective.
I have mentioned a few good exercises for targeting your triceps above. However the title has to provide you just one exercise, which is the best. In my opinion all the exercises mentioned above for pushing are great and you choose any one of those depending on your preference. Or you can cycle through these exercises to keep a variety in your workout. However if you really insist me on choosing one exercise as the best exercise, then I will go with close hand push-ups. The reason I chose Close hand push-up or Diamond push-up as the best is because it is a no equipment exercise that you can perform anywhere. It is as effective as other exercises mentioned, while at the same time you do not need a gym to perform this exercise.
While choosing exercises for your workout, regardless of the muscle group you are targeting, always keep in mind that the bests exercises are compound movements, which are functional. Such exercises create maximum damage to your muscle fibers in smallest amount of time and therefore lead to faster muscle growth. Also such exercises put a higher load in your cardiovascular system and hence also help in developing a healthy heart.
Originally published at www.kaa-yaa.com.
