Many people have them, but few love them. Bat wings is a term describing flabby triceps that flap or bounce when you move your arm or wave at someone. It’s a common problem that becomes more pronounced with age, as muscles contract in size and body fat increases. Exercise and a healthy diet are your best defense against bat wings, irrespective of age.
The Problem of Bat Wings and Why Exercise Alone Won’t Solve It
You might hope that exercise alone will turn those bat wings into firm arms that don’t flap when you wave. Unfortunately, exercise alone isn’t enough. A combination of low muscle mass in the triceps and too much fat overlying the muscle creates bat wings. If you feel the back of your upper arm and can pinch a mound of squishy fat between your fingers, too much fat is contributing to your “wings.”
How do you solve the problem? Strength training can strengthen your triceps and increase the thickness of the muscle, but you must also lose the excess fat that covers them. Exercise will help, but you need exercises that burn lots of calories. For strength training, this means compound exercises that work multiple muscle groups, like squats and deadlifts. Push-ups and dips are another good choice since they’re compound exercises that target your triceps. You also need aerobic exercise or high-intensity interval training in your routine to increase your total calorie burn.
The other component of solving the bat wing problem is nutrition. Food choices have as much impact on flabby triceps as the exercises you do and how physically active you are. First step: clean up your diet so you’re consuming fewer calories, and choose whole, unrefined foods over junk food and foods with added sugar. As the saying goes, physiques are built in the kitchen, but you also have to work with weights.
You Still Need Focused Triceps Training
Now that you know how to tackle the excess fat that covers your triceps through diet and calorie-burning exercise, what’s the best approach to building more defined triceps muscles? A study carried out by the American Council on Exercise surveyed some of the most common triceps exercises to see which were most effective for activating the triceps muscles. Their method of determining which muscle was the most active was EMG (electromyography). The winner was a type of push-up called a triangle push-up.
How do you do a triangle push-up? You probably know how to do a standard push-up, but for a triangle push-up, you place your hands closer together, so your two thumbs and index fingers are touching each other to form a triangle. With your hands in this position, you do push-ups in the usual way using good form. The closeness of your hands increases activation of your triceps and makes the exercise more challenging.
Triangle push-ups, like all push-ups, activate your core muscles, so you work more than one muscle group at a time. That’s the secret to burning more calories! You should master a standard push-up first before tackling this more advanced triceps burning push-up variation. If you can’t do a triangle push-up, placing your hands closer together will also target your triceps more.
Do a Variety of Triceps Exercises
Although triceps push-ups ranked highest for triceps activation based on EMG activity, you should still include a variety of triceps exercises that target your triceps in different ways. For example, triceps dips ranked second in the study for triceps activation. Plus, triceps dips are a compound exercise that activates multiple muscle groups and burns more calories than an isolation exercise, like triceps extensions. But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t include extensions in your upper body workouts too. Extensions, also known as kickbacks, are a way to focus more precisely on your triceps muscles. Plus, they’re beneficial if you have a strength imbalance on one side and need to work one triceps muscle harder than the other.
You can also challenge your triceps and build strength and size by varying the tempo of your repetitions. For example, with triceps push-ups and dips, do some repetitions slowly. This will increase the amount of time the muscle is under tension, which can spur growth. Also, do some repetitions with a brisk tempo, so you boost fast-twitch muscle fiber recruitment and build greater power. Don’t let your triceps routine become too routine if you want to continue to make strength and size gains.
The Bottom Line
The key to losing bat wings is a combination of fat loss and strength training to boost the size of your triceps muscles and trim the fat. The goal is to change the ratio of muscle to fat, more muscle, and less fat. This requires a clean diet and consistent triceps training. Strength training alone will strengthen your triceps and upper body, but it won’t reduce the fat that flaps when you wave your arms like a bat.
Also, understand that if you have loose skin or skin laxity due to aging, shedding fat and building larger triceps won’t solve the problem. Exercise and dietary changes won’t tighten loose skin. That requires tightening the skin through surgery. However, building triceps size and definition can still improve the topography of the back of your upper arm and make it look better. You can improve the appearance of your arms somewhat through training and exercise, even if you have skin laxity. Plus, you’ll build stronger and better functioning triceps and get in better shape while you’re at it.
References:
- “ACE Study Identifies Best Triceps Exercises.” .acefitness.org/certifiednewsarticle/3008/ace-study-identifies-best-triceps-exercises/.
- Kim YS, Kim DY, Ha MS. Effect of the push-up exercise at different palmar width on muscle activities. J Phys Ther Sci. 2016 Jan;28(2):446-9. doi: 10.1589/jpts.28.446. Epub 2016 Feb 29. PMID: 27064571; PMCID: PMC4792988.
- Calatayud J, Borreani S, Colado JC, Martín FF, Rogers ME, Behm DG, Andersen LL. Muscle Activation during Push-Ups with Different Suspension Training Systems. J Sports Sci Med. 2014 Sep 1;13(3):502-10. PMID: 25177174; PMCID: PMC4126284.
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What’s the Best Plan of Attack for Flabby Triceps or “Bat Wings?”
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