When it comes to triceps size and shape, there are very few musclemen in history who could hang with Heath. His lateral heads—the stars of a side triceps shot—are stupendously dense, as are the long (inner) heads.
ROPE PUSHDOWNS
This legend begins triceps work with rope pushdowns, which focuses on the tri lateral heads.
HIGHER REPS
Phil feels that tri’s respond best to slightly higher reps than bi’s. The reigning king of bodybuilding sticks to the 12–15 range.
VARIETY
He maximizes diversity in his four-exercise workouts, hitting tri’s with both unilateral and bilateral exercises with a panoply of tools and grips. This variegation ensures that he stresses all three triceps heads.
DIPS
Phil feels that best end to his tri training is dips, either with bars or a machine. Because dips also involve the delts and the pecs, they’re a good compound exercise to do last when the triceps have been pre-exhausted with isolation lifts.
VOLUME
Heath performs four exercises in his typical workout listed here, with three sets per exercise.
INTENSITY
Heath has to sometimes ride the brakes to make certain his arms don’t overwhelm the rest of his physique and throw off his symmetry.
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BICEPS
While Heath’s bi’s do not have the highest peak in the industry, in each of his Olympia victories they’ve possessed a quality in abundance that most gargantuan arms lack: detailing. His arms in a front double biceps are an anatomy chart, and, upon close inspection, both biceps are striped with sinewy fissures.
VOLUME
Heath’s biceps workouts typically consist of four exercises, three sets of 10 reps each.
FREE WEIGHTS
On occasion Heath may use a machine or cable for curls, but more often than not he chooses only free weights. He believes a barbell, an EZ-curl bar, dumbbells, and a preacher/ spider bench are all that’s necessary for optimum biceps work.
MIND TO MUSCLE
Heath preaches the importance of focusing intensely on every rep from stretch to contraction. He’s always attuned to the sensation of the targeted area under tension, and he often watches his biceps contract to better concentrate on the muscle, not the metal.
ORDER
Heath starts his workout with unilateral dumbbell curls and finishes with bilateral bar curls. There are many “right” ways to arrange your exercises, and this can be changed from workout to workout.
ALTERNATION
Heath sometimes alternates his dumbbell curls the traditional way, switching back and forth between his left and right sides each rep, but he’s more likely to do five reps with one side before doing five reps with the other. He believes this allows him to better target each muscle.
REP RANGE
The No. 1 bodybuilder in the world aims for 10 reps in every set.
EMPHASIS
Heath places a greater focus on contractions with spider curls and concentration curls.
Despite never having done a working set of wrist curls, the six-time Mr. O, known as the Gift, boasts two of the all-time best lower arms. He sometimes does hammer curls, but hammers focus on the brachialis and biceps of the upper arms as well as the brachioradialis of the forearms.
