Triceps how many times a week

Many common workouts will already target many of these muscle groups on each given day. For example, the bench press targets the chest, triceps, and shoulders, making it ideal for day 3 of this routine. Below are some examples of exercises that work major muscle groups. People can choose to individualize a workout by adding or taking away these moves.

They can also swap out exercises to maintain variety in their workout. When considering a regular workout routine, it may help to structure which exercises to perform.

For example, people may find it useful to separate strength training exercises by muscle groups to give their muscles more time to recover. It is also important for people to include sufficient rest between workout days to avoid overtraining. It may also be beneficial to warm up before exercising and to concentrate on good form and technique while exercising. Performing particular exercises and eating the right foods can help a person build muscle over time.

Learn about the types of exercise and diet that…. A look at how long it takes to build muscle by working out. Included is detail on macronutrients and the best way to build muscle safely and….

People can strengthen and define the lower chest by performing exercises that target the pectoral muscles. These exercises use either barbells…. There is evidence that some beneficial muscle-building supplements include protein, creatine, and caffeine. NordicTrack Vault and Tempo both offer workout mirrors suitable for exercising at home.

Learn more here. Which muscle groups can people work out together? Medically reviewed by Daniel Bubnis, M. Importance Which muscle groups to pair Beginners Advanced lifters Example workout Exercise list Summary Regular strength training can help build muscle and improve health. Why is it important to work out the right muscle groups together? Which muscle groups to pair together. Examples for beginners. Examples for advanced lifters. Example workout schedule.

List of exercises that target certain muscle groups. The triceps are a small muscle group that recovers fairly quickly. Consider doing triceps after chest—they're an assistance muscle in chest-pressing motions, so you might as well go ahead and finish them off. You can also train triceps on a day separate from chest, either by themselves or with biceps.

When you do triceps without training a larger muscle group beforehand, they won't be prefatigued, so you'll be able to push some impressive weights.

Just be careful when you're setting up your split so you're not doing triceps on consecutive days. Devise your split so that at least 48 hours separates workouts for the same muscle group. Warm-up movements aside, nothing is more cringe-worthy than seeing someone start his triceps workout with press-downs—or worse, reverse-grip press-downs.

Why the judgment? If your goal is bigger arms, you want to start your routine with the exercises with which you can push the most weight. That's why you should start your leg workout with squats and chest with bench presses. As a rule, those exercises are multijoint moves. Because more than a single set of joints are working, you're recruiting more muscle mass. As a result, you can lift more weight. Among triceps exercises, various types of dips and close-grip bench presses qualify as multijoint.

It's better to do those moves early in your workout when your energy levels are higher, rather than waiting till you're fatigued later on. Bottom line: If your first exercise is one in which you can't push much weight, save it for the end of your session. If you're doing triceps after chest, know that they're already pretty fatigued. They've played an active role in all those presses from any angle. While you might not be able to go as heavy with triceps, you can still knock the smithereens out of 'em.

One challenging way is to finish them off with just a single exercise. This technique works only if you've done a heavy chest workout first, so your triceps will already be fatigued. Choose one exercise; for our purposes we'll do the rope press-down.

You'll be doing the movement for 10 minutes straight. Choose a weight in which you can do about 10 reps, and do you first set for as many reps as you can. Return the weight to the stack at failure, and after only a second rest interval, do another set—as many as you can. Your reps will balloon back up a bit, but the short rest intervals quickly induce fatigue as your reps start to fall on successive sets.

Keep this up for 10 minutes straight; your arms will be thoroughly pumped—and you'll have a newfound muscle soreness for the next day or two. For more on how to use this technique, read "Finishing Moves: Torching Triceps. While all triceps moves involve elbow extension, you can emphasize not isolate a particular head by changing arm position.

When we squat and deadlift, our spinal erectors need to stabilize our spines. When we hold weights in our hands, our upper traps engage. And our biceps are often active, both in the gym and in our day-to-day lives. Our backs get a lot of work, and they tend to handle it well. With the lifts that hit your spinal erectors hard, such as barbell rows and deadlifts , you might want to be more conservative, doing them just once a week, especially if they leave your back feeling sore for several days.

The muscles in our legs are the biggest muscles in our bodies, and so they can often get quite sore for quite a long time. For example, in this study , it took 4 days to fully recover from doing 5 sets of 12 repetitions on the leg press. As a result, you may only want to train your legs 2—3 times per week, especially as you get stronger. Then, because our quads are so massive, it can take quite a while for them to recover. Plus, the big leg exercises tend to be so heavy that they cause quite a lot of overall fatigue.

Doing 4—8 sets for your legs twice per week will probably be enough to maximize your rate of muscle growth. Many people benefit from training their shoulders as often as 3—4 times per week. As a result, our shoulders can often recover fairly quickly. If we train our shoulders with the bench press, close-grip bench press, and incline bench press, we can challenge them at longer muscle lengths, but even then, they often recover quite fast.

Plus, there are different heads of our shoulders, all of which perform different functions. One day you might want to train the overhead press, another the bench press, and another the close-grip bench press. As a result, you may want to include at least some shoulder work in every single workout you do. If you train your arms hard , then training them twice per week is probably enough to maximize their rate of muscle growth.

For example, this study found that if you do 8 sets of rows, your back will need a couple of days to recover, but your biceps will be fully recovered within 24 hours. But if you do a dedicated arm workout, that changes dramatically.

In this study, beginners doing 8 sets of preacher curls caused enough muscle damage that, after 4 days, their biceps were still recovering. Not only does that volume add up, but those workouts are also fairly quick to recover from, allowing you to train your arms more often.

For example, in this study , we see twice as much growth in our triceps if we do both the bench press and the triceps extensions. The same is true with many of the other muscles in our arms. So, after doing your compound lifts, you could add in some biceps curls, triceps extensions, lateral raises , and forearm curls.

Or you could add a fourth workout day, giving your arms a day all to themselves. Our abs recover quite quickly and can handle quite a lot of training volume, meaning that we can train them a few times per week without any issues.

And since our abs are active during most of our lifts, we often train them every workout—even if we never do any ab isolation exercises. Like your arms, your abs will get a little bit of work during most of your workouts. The chin-up, push-up, overhead press, front squat, and a variety of other lifts all train your abs.

But if you notice your abs falling behind, doing some crunches or hanging leg raises at the end of your workouts can work wonders. Working out 3—6 times per week tends to be ideal for building muscle.

To build muscle at full speed, we want to train each muscle at least twice per week. That means doing 2 full-body workouts. Why would you do 2 full-body workouts per week? You can work out just twice per week and still get pretty good results.

Plus, lifting twice per week is enough to get most of the health benefits of weight training. What are the downsides? Most of your energy will be eaten up by squatting, bench pressing, deadlifting, overhead pressing, and doing chin-ups. To build a 2-day workout program, we recommend making 2—3 different full-body workouts and alternating between them.

For example, the first workout might have 3—4 sets of front squats, the second might have no squats, and the third might have 2—3 sets of Zercher squats. That gives you a squat frequency of 1. That frees up time and energy for mixing in a wider variety of lifts, allowing you to make your program more balanced, and allowing you to keep each workout from becoming overly fatiguing. We only need to train our muscles twice per week, so not every workout needs to train every muscle.

That makes things much easier. For instance, we can squat and bench twice per week, but train our shoulders and arms three times per week. The research on full-body workout routines is quite good, too. For example, in this study , putting a rest day between the full-body workouts allowed the participants to fully regain their strength, allowing them to train hard again. This is important because it means that even just that single day of rest is long enough to allow us to outlift ourselves every workout, achieving progressive overload.

Why would you do 3 full-body workouts per week? Your hands will get a break, so will your traps, so will your back, and so will your connective tissues.

Even as an intermediate lifter, doing 3 full-body workouts is often enough to allow you to build muscle at full speed overall. That can mean doing specialization phases, where you spend a few months focusing on just a few muscle groups. And that works very well, too. There are so many great exercises for building muscle , and we only have so much time to do them. By adding more workouts, we give ourselves more time and energy to do more lifts. To build a 3-day workout program, as with the 2-day workout routine, we recommend making 2—3 different full-body workouts and alternating between them.

For example, the first workout might have 3—5 sets of the bench press, the second might have the overhead press, and the third might have a close-grip bench press. This is the approach we used in the 3-day Outlift workout routine.

You only need to train your muscles twice per week, so now we can explore body-part splits, perhaps even using a combination of full-body workouts and body-part splits. For example, in this study , the participants doing a 4-day routine increased their chest circumference by slightly more, but overall, gained the same amount of muscle mass as the group doing 3 full-body workouts per week.

Why would you do 4 workouts per week? As you get stronger, your sets will become more draining, requiring longer rest times.

Workouts can start to get long, and it can be hard to grind through exercise after exercise. There are no major downsides to training 4 days per week, other than the extra time investment, especially if you need to commute to a gym.

Our connective tissues still get plenty of rest, and most people can recover from them fairly well. So if you want to add an extra workout day, I say go for it. To build a 4-day workout program, there are a variety of different options, and many of them are good. Here are a few great ones:. Why would you do 5 workouts per week? As you get stronger, longer workouts can become hard.

By working out more days per week, you can spread the exercises out over more days, keeping your workouts short.

A lot of people find those shorter workouts easier to manage, especially if they enjoy going to the gym or enjoy training at home. It becomes part of their daily routine. Even if you use an elaborate body-part split that keeps you from training your muscles two days in a row, you still need to watch out for fatigue, especially in the areas being worked every day, such as your spinal erectors. To build a 5-day workout program, you could do short full-body workouts every day, cycling through a variety of different exercises for each muscle group.

For instance, Monday is the squat, Tuesday is the leg extension, Thursday is the leg press, and so on. A more popular approach is to use a body-part split routine.

For example, you might use a workout routine like this:. But there are many different body-part split permutations, and many of them are good. Why would you do 6 workouts per week? Other people enjoy going to the gym or find it easy to dip into short home workouts.

If you want to lift weights more often, this is a good way to do it. The workouts tend to be short, and you may need to intentionally use smaller lifts to avoid fatiguing your stabilizer muscles: seated shoulder pressing instead of standing, exercise machines instead of free weights, t-bar rows instead of barbell rows, and so on.

And that works great, giving each muscle a day or two of recovery between workouts. Even just lifting weights is great, and lifting does improve our cardiovascular fitness, but some dedicated cardio can help.

Training your muscles 2—4 times per week is ideal for building muscle. There are many different workout routines that can stimulate your muscles 2—4 times per week, ranging from a 2-day full-body routine all the way up to a 6-day split routine. As a default, we recommend 3-day full-body routines for beginners and early intermediate lifters. Then, once those workouts start getting too long and hard, or if you start running up against a plateau, consider adding a fourth day.

There are a lot of good routines for building muscle. When that soreness abates, you can train the muscle again.

And, as always, if you want a customizable workout program and full guide that builds these principles in, check out our Outlift Intermediate Bulking Program , which includes both 3-day and 4-day workout routines. His specialty is helping people build muscle to improve their strength and general health, with clients including college, professional, and Olympic athletes.

I work out at home and 6 short workouts are easier to fit in than 3 long ones. Plus, I CAN do my workout at 9pm after kids are in bed if something prevents it during the day.

To your comment about managing fatigue, I found that splitting the 4-day Hard Outlift routine in to 6 days was too much for me, especially in that 5th week.

Average workout length across the 6 days and 5 weeks is about 35 minutes.