Are you getting a little tired of “gain big arms” articles that lack 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 “build your triceps more than your biceps” because the triceps make up two-thirds the size of your upper arm… “blah blah blah.”
Hey… are you such a neophyte that you need to read about standing barbell curls as a feasible way to build bigger arms? I don’t believe it; 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 in 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 from their sides.
Get ‘Bigger Arms’: Why You Should Listen To Me
First reason: My upper arms continue to grow, week by week, month by month, with each passing year.
Second reason: I am forty-six years old, not twenty-six. If you’re younger than me, you have nothing to blame but useless training methods if your arms don’t grow while you make 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
The next time someone tells you to ‘get big arms’ by training your triceps more than your biceps; you may want to question their credibility. Yes, you want your triceps to get maximum growth for bigger arms. But training more is NOT always the answer to gain more. Often, it is 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 overly excited about building arm size and perform too many sets of upper arm exercises as a result. Additionally, they often exacerbate this overtraining scenario by doing arm exercises too frequently. Overtraining like this will ensure that your arms stay their current size and don’t get to the target size you’re working so hard to get.
Consider this: Your upper arms are used secondarily and as stabilizers in many upper body exercises, such as bench presses and rowing movements. This makes it more susceptible to excessive tearing of tissue 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 and gets stronger while we rest and recover. The likelihood of overworking the biceps and triceps often requires performing fewer direct 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 ‘get big arms’?
Bottom line: 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 to blame. 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 tracking the progress of ‘bigger arms’
I’ll be blunt: you’re very likely to make mistake #1 if you don’t keep a written log of workouts and rest days in your quest to ‘get big arms.’
When I see people go to the gym and work 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 they’re not going to get a noticeably better body for their time and effort, they might as well do some other worthwhile activity with their time. And if they don’t track sets, reps, and recovery time between workouts, they’ll have a hard time distinguishing between when they’ve hit a highly effective muscle breakdown/recovery ratio and when they’re just going through the motions.
Let me provide a simple example. Let’s say you work your upper arms on Monday. You perform a random number of sets that include some intensification techniques, such as forced repetitions. You assume your biceps and triceps will be fully healed and ready for your next workout a week from now. Unbeknownst to you, however, the intense training has torn the tissue more than you thought. When you work them the following Monday, they don’t perform any better than the week before because they actually needed eight days of rest instead of six due to the hard training they’ve undergone. But how will you know how they actually performed compared to the first workout without seeing it on paper? Also, how are you going to determine the optimal number of rest days given a certain amount of torn tissue unless you have a written record that gives you the necessary feedback? A written record can show you long-term trends going back a few weeks in your quest to “get the big guns.”
Personally, I am making incredible progress in getting bigger arms by using a record keeping system that is so simple that it would be painfully self-defeating to go back to doing arm exercises without the system. When you learn to put it down 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 Bad 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 pack too much weight on a curling bar and then proceed to do standing barbell curls, raising 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 it isn’t. The notion that “cheat reps” are rationalized and performed with is the one that says that to “get big arms” we need to “train heavy.” But “heavy” is a relative term. What is heavy in terms of the weight I can cheat with is relative in its difficulty for me to lift a weight that is lighter and 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 the “heavy” weight will lose much of this target while favoring dubious means of driving and recruiting “non-target” muscles 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 should 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’s found here? A bit; But borrowing an old medical adage that “first, do no harm” would be wise in your quest for bigger arms. And if you avoid all three of these blunders (especially the overtraining mistake), you’ll likely see your upper arms explode with new growth.