I know a lot of the “performance” crowd like to use this as a good butt for their particular brand of dull humour but let’s face it your lifting weights chances are you want bigger pipes. There is absolutely no shame in it infact I would venture if your a man who lifts weights and you don’t look like it in a T-Shirt your probably not doing enough beach weights (nothing wrong with girls have a pair of sleeve busters either!).
My arms aren’t the most impressive feature on my body at their biggest they where 18″ when I was in full fledged obesity mode but they sit at just over 17″ when I am in reasonable shape. I don’t pay massive attention to them but when I do I find it reasonably easy to put on a noticeable amount of mass in 4-6 weeks.
If your not training your arms 3-5x a week or using some of the exercises in this article chances are you can see a pretty good boost in the size of your toothpicks in a pretty short time period.
So with out further ado here are some dirty hints and tips for getting bigger arms.
Tip number one – Arms are small and therefore can recover relatively quickly from training so train them often!
One of the best ways to increase the size of your arms is to increase your training frequency most people will throw in arms once or maybe twice a week and see some progress but you can easily get in more volume and spent less time doing it by spreading it across the week. You can follow a simple template like this and not have to worry about over training or causing inflammation of the elbow.
Day 1 – heavy press with supplementary bicep work (4 to 6 sets at a moderate intensity)
Day 2 – Legs with supplementary tricep and bicep work (4 to 6 sets at a light intensity i.e. machines or cables)
Day 3 – Heavy Pull with supplementary triceps work (4 to 6 sets at a moderate intensity).
Day 4 – Off
Day 5 – Push Pull Work / heavy arms (6 to 10 sets of heavy exercises)
Day 6 – Legs with arms (3 to 5 sets at a light intensity)
Day 7 – Off
Tip number two heavy partial range of movement exercises are great for hammering both biceps and triceps.
Cutting off the range of movement in compound exercises is a great way of getting a heavy work load done and isolating your arms as much as possible. Your arms tend to be involved the most in pressing at lock out and during back movments a lot of the muscular effort comes from the elbow joint near the top end of the range.
Good examples of exercises and sets x reps for arms
Triceps –
Top half dips / Board or foam press / Top half close grip bench / Heavy push downs using bottom half.
Sets x reps – 3 to 6 sets of 4 to 8 reps.
Biceps
Exercise – top half preacher curl (DB or bar), Top Half Chins, Cheated barbell curl
Sets x reps – 3 to 6 sets of 4 to 8 reps.
Tip 3 – Easy volume work is a good way of adding in extra swole but not eating too much into your recovery.
Next time your in your gym look over at the cable stack and the machine weights area right next to the newbies and fat chicks reading books you will see a species in the gym known as the cable monkey. These guys do jack shit except for free weight curl/bench press and then spend the rest of their workout camped out by the machine weights and especially the cable machine. Note the developed arms and chest muscles of the cable monkey now you might wonder how did they get those arms while bench pressing the princely sum of 100 kg? The answer to your query is volume and frequency.
If the only thing you do is cable and machine weights your recovery time is very quick and as thus you can do a lot of it. It is perfectly fesable to do a 20-25 set work out of 10 reps 4-5x a week with machine weights and not have a terrible amount of doms, as you might expect this kind of training volume will make you bigger with out a huge demand for intensity.
The take home lesson is you can throw in a few sets of machine or cable weights with out having to worry about your recovery and over time this extra volume will add up in biceps inches.
Tip 4 – The Triceps is 2/3rds of your arm / compound movement is all you need old wives tales.
Basically strong arms are big arms so if you get good at the heavy movement exercises (bench press, chin up and barbell/dumbbell row variations) this is true but I just want to make a point here.
If you want big arms you should do fucking isolation work.
There I said it I feel better now.
Tip 5 – Finishers
The main reason for doing a finisher is to get a pump and look immediately bigger the second you walk out of the gym lets be honest here the theory of blood transportation of nutrients to the muscle at the end of a work out is bullshit and you know it. Looking bigger instantly from doing an easy exercise is cool and we all like it there is no shame in it so lets talk pump.
My favourite way of getting a pump is high rep, strict form and large range of motion exercises.
Biceps – Curl against the wall, strict cable curl, strict machine curl, incline dumbbell curl.
Sets x Reps – 3-5 sets of 12 to 21 reps. (21s gotta everyone knows the drill).
Biceps – BW Dips, rolling pushdowns, strict push downs and band pushdowns.
Sets x Reps – 3-5 sets of 12 to 21 reps. (21s gotta everyone knows the drill).
So with those finishers so finishes our arm article now go forth and obtain thy swole.
Marc
