Best Bodyweight Exercises for Triceps — Top 9
Bodyweight training is training anywhere with no equipment. Here are the best bodyweight exercises for targeting your triceps, ranked by effectiveness. Bodyweight training builds relative strength, body control, and joint resilience with zero equipment.
Ranked by triceps muscle activation percentage, range of motion quality with bodyweight, and progressive overload potential.
The bodyweight tricep extension is a challenging exercise where you lower your body toward a bar or surface by bending at the elbows, similar to a skull crusher but using your own bodyweight. It heavily loads the long head of the triceps.
Key Form Cue
Grip a bar at roughly waist height with hands shoulder width apart, arms extended.
The tiger bend push-up starts in a forearm plank and requires you to press up to a full push-up position using only tricep extension. It is one of the most challenging bodyweight tricep exercises and builds tremendous lockout strength.
Key Form Cue
Start in a forearm plank position with elbows directly under your shoulders.
Diamond push-ups place your hands close together in a diamond shape, shifting the emphasis from chest to triceps. EMG studies show they produce higher tricep activation than most isolation exercises.
Key Form Cue
Place your hands together under your chest, forming a diamond shape with thumbs and index fingers.
Bench dips are a beginner-friendly tricep exercise. Place your hands on a bench behind you, lower your body by bending your elbows, and press back up.
Key Form Cue
Place your hands on a bench behind you, fingers pointing forward.
Dips are a compound bodyweight exercise that heavily loads the chest and triceps. Lean forward to emphasize the chest or stay upright to target the triceps. They allow easy progressive overload with a dip belt.
Key Form Cue
Lean forward 15-30 degrees to shift emphasis from triceps to chest.
The resistance band push-up adds accommodating resistance to the classic push-up, making the lockout portion harder. This builds explosive pressing power and improves top-end chest strength.
Key Form Cue
Loop the band across your upper back and hold each end under your palms.
The push-up is the foundational bodyweight pressing exercise. It builds chest, tricep, and shoulder strength while training core stability. No equipment needed — just your body and the floor.
Key Form Cue
Hands slightly wider than shoulder-width, fingers spread for a stable base.
The pike push-up places your body in an inverted V position to shift the load onto the shoulders rather than the chest. It is an excellent bodyweight progression toward handstand push-ups and builds pressing strength without equipment.
Key Form Cue
Start in a push-up position, then walk your feet toward your hands until your hips are high and your body forms an inverted V.
The wide-grip push-up places the hands well outside shoulder width to increase the stretch and activation of the chest. It reduces tricep involvement compared to a standard push-up, making it a more chest-dominant variation.
Key Form Cue
Place hands roughly 1.5 times shoulder width apart with fingers angled slightly outward.
Put these exercises into a real program
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