Bigger Arms: How To “Get Big Arms” By Avoiding 3 Big Mistakes
Health FitnessAre you getting a little tired of “get big arms” articles that lack any really valuable information on how to improve your arm size? You know what I mean; containing brilliantly original information like “do standing barbell curls” and “develop your triceps more than your biceps” because the triceps are two-thirds the size of your upper arm… “blah blah blah.”
Hey… are you such a newbie that you need to read about standing barbell curls being a doable way to build bigger arms? I do not think so; it’s like the first exercise a ten year old instinctively does when he gets his first set of weights.
No… I won’t bore you or waste your time with the redundant ‘bigger arms’ advice you’d see flipping through any muscle-headed newspaper you can find on most newsstands. Instead, I’ll go over the top three reasons I’ve observed that keep people from enjoying having big, shapely, powerful guns hanging off their sides.
Getting ‘Bigger Arms’: Why Should You Listen To Me?
First reason: My upper arms continue to grow, week after week, month after month, with each passing year.
Second reason: I’m forty-six years old, not twenty-six. If you are younger than me, you have nothing to blame but useless training methods if your arms don’t grow while making an honest effort to get big arms.
Third reason: My bodybuilding genetics suck and I don’t use steroids and never have.
Mistake #1: Overtraining the upper arms
Next time someone tells you to ‘get big arms’ by training your triceps more than your biceps; you may want to question its credibility. Yes, you want your triceps to get maximum growth for bigger arms. But training more is NOT always the answer to earning more. It is often counterproductive and a recipe for disaster.
If one or both of your triceps and biceps aren’t gaining strength and size, you’re most likely overtraining them. Many trainees (especially men) get too excited about building arm size and as a result do too many sets of upper arm exercises. Additionally, they often exacerbate this overtraining scenario by doing arm exercises too often. Overtraining like this will ensure that your arms stay at their current size and don’t take on the target size you’re working so hard to achieve.
Consider this: Your upper arms are used secondarily and as stabilizers in many upper-body exercises, like bench presses and rowing movements. This makes its susceptibility to excessive tearing of tissue more frequent than with other muscles, such as the chest. Muscles don’t gain size and strength directly from workouts. It is an indirect effect; we break down tissue during workouts and it grows stronger while we rest and recover. The likelihood of biceps and triceps being overworked often necessitates performing fewer straight sets for the upper arms and providing more rest days between workouts.
How can you tell if you’re overtraining your arms in your quest to ‘have big arms’?
Quite simply: if you’re training your triceps and biceps with a respectable amount of intensity and you’re not gaining strength or size, overtraining is probably the culprit. The remedy is to reduce the number of sets you’re doing and/or add more rest days between your arm workouts.
Mistake #2: Not keeping track of ‘bigger arms’ progress
I’ll be blunt: you’re likely to make mistake #1 if you don’t keep a written log of workouts and rest days in your quest to ‘have big arms.’
When I see people going to the gym and working out without keeping track of what they’re doing, I assume I’m among the people who have no qualms about wasting time. Why would they want to do that? If you’re not going to get a noticeably better body for your time and effort, you might as well do some other worthwhile activity with your time. And if you don’t track sets, reps, and recovery time between workouts, you’ll have a hard time distinguishing between when you’ve reached a highly effective muscle breakdown/recovery ratio and when you’re just going. through the movements.
Let me provide a simple example. Let’s say you work your upper arms on Monday. You do a random number of sets that include some escalation techniques, like forced reps. You assume that your biceps and triceps will be fully recovered and ready for their next workout within a week. However, unbeknownst to you, the intense training has torn the tissue apart more than you thought. When you work them the following Monday, they don’t perform any better than they did the week before because they really needed eight days off instead of six due to the hard training they’ve been through. But how will you know how they actually performed compared to the first workout without seeing it on paper? Also, how will you determine the optimal number of rest days given a certain amount of torn tissue unless you have a written record to provide you with the necessary feedback? A written log can show you long-term trends going back a few weeks in your quest to “get big guns.”
Personally, I am making incredible progress toward bigger arms by using a record-keeping system that is so simple that it would be painfully counterproductive to go back to doing arm exercises without the system. When you learn to put it on paper the easy way and interpret and adjust to the feedback, your arms will expand like crazy. That’s exciting.
Mistake #3: Trying to ‘get big arms’ with poor exercise form
“Cheat reps” – these are almost identical to some people’s routines for “bigger arms”. How many times have you seen a guy or group of guys in the gym as they pile on too much weight on a curling bar and then proceed to do standing barbell curls where they lift their upper body to gain enough momentum with each rep? to “curl” the weight?
Is this technique effective?
My twenty-five or so years in natural bodybuilding have told me that it is not. The notion with which “cheat reps” are rationalized and performed is that in order to “get big arms” we need to “train heavy.” But “heavy” is a relative term. What is heavy in terms of weight I can cheat with is relative in its difficulty to lift to a weight that is lighter and more challenging to move with strict form. The difference is that strict form is more likely to engage the maximum muscle fibers of the target muscle, while sloppy form with “heavy” weight will miss much of this target while favoring dubious means of boosting and recruiting “non” muscles. target” to move. the weight.
What’s more, muscle growth for ‘bigger arms’ (and all other muscles) isn’t so much about “training heavy” as it is about “turning heavy weights into lighter weights”. Therefore, any weight that is currently difficult to lift strictly during standing barbell curls must be easier to lift in the near future for arm growth to occur.
conclusion
Is there more to the ‘get big guns’ formula than what is found here? A little; but borrowing an old medical adage that says “first, do no harm” would be wise in your quest for bigger arms. And if you avoid the three aforementioned blunders (especially the overtraining mistake), you’ll likely see your upper arms explode with new growth.