Getting a little tired of ‘get big arms’ articles that lack really valuable information on how to improve your arm size? You know what I mean; containing brilliantly original information such as “do standing barbell curls” and “develop more triceps than biceps” because triceps make up two-thirds of the size of the arm … “blah blah blah.”
Hey … are you such a newbie that you need to read about standing barbell curls being a viable way to build bigger arms? I do not 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 in any muscle newspaper you can find on most newsstands. Instead, I’ll go over the top three reasons I’ve observed that prevent people from enjoying owning large, shapely, and powerful weapons hanging at their sides.
Get ‘Bigger Arms’: Why Should You Listen To Me?
First reason: My upper arms keep growing, 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 except useless training methods if your arms don’t grow while you make an honest effort to get big arms.
Third reason: My bodybuilding genetics sucks and I don’t use steroids and never have.
Mistake # 1: Overtraining Your Upper Arms
The next time someone tells you to “have 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. Often times, it is counterproductive and a recipe for disaster.
If one or both of the triceps and biceps are not gaining strength and size, it is very likely that you are overtraining them. Many trainees (especially men) become overzealous about developing arm size and, as a result, perform too many sets of upper arm exercises. Also, they often exacerbate this overtraining scenario by doing arm exercises too often. Overtraining in this way will ensure that your arms maintain their current size and do not acquire the desired size that you are working so hard for.
Consider this: the upper arms are used secondarily and as stabilizers in many upper body exercises, such as the bench press and rowing movements. This makes their susceptibility to excessive tissue wear more common than with other muscles, such as the chest. Muscles do not gain size and strength directly from workouts. It is an indirect effect; We break down tissue during workouts and it grows and becomes stronger while resting and recovering. The likelihood of the biceps and triceps being overworked often requires performing fewer direct sets for the upper arms while providing more days of rest between workouts.
How can you tell if you are overtraining your arms in your quest to ‘have big arms’?
Bottom line: If you’re training your triceps and biceps with a respectable amount of intensity and you’re not gaining strength and size, overtraining is probably the culprit. The remedy is to reduce the number of sets you are doing and / or add more rest days between your arm workouts.
Mistake # 2: Not keeping track of ‘Bigger Arms’ progress
I’ll keep it simple: it is very likely that you will make mistake n. 1 if you don’t keep a written record of workouts and rest days in your quest to ‘get big arms’.
When I see people going to the gym and striving to exercise without keeping track of what they are doing, I assume I am among the people who have no qualms about wasting time. Why would they want to do that? If you’re not going to have 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 keep track of your sets, reps, and recovery time between workouts, it’ll be difficult to distinguish between when you’ve reached a highly effective muscle breakdown / recovery ratio and when you’re just going. through movements.
Let me give you a simple example. Let’s say you work your upper arms on Monday. You do a random number of sets that include some intensification techniques, like forced reps. You assume that your biceps and triceps will be fully recovered and ready for your next workout in a week. However, unbeknownst to you, the intense training has destroyed more tissue than you ever imagined. When you work them out the following Monday, they don’t perform any better than the week before because they really needed eight days off instead of six due to the hard training they went through. 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 days off given a certain amount of torn tissue unless you have a written record that provides you with the necessary feedback? A written record can show you long-term trends going back a few weeks in your quest for “getting big guns.”
Personally, I am making incredible progress towards getting bigger arms by using a record keeping system that is so simple that it would be painfully counterproductive to go back to doing arm workouts without the system. When you learn to put it on paper in the easiest way and interpret and adjust to feedback, your arms will expand like crazy. That’s exciting.
Error n. # 3: trying to ‘get big arms’ with bad exercise form
“Cheat reps”: These are almost synonymous with some people’s “bigger arms” routines. How many times have you seen a guy or group of guys at the gym as they pack too much weight on a curling bar and then proceed to do standing bar curls for which they lift their upper body to gain enough momentum with each rep? to “curl” the weight?
Is this technique effective?
My twenty-five years or so in natural bodybuilding have told me that it is not. The notion with which “cheat reps” are rationalized and performed is one that says that in order to “have big arms” we need to “train heavy.” But “heavy” is a relative term. What is heavy in terms of weight that I can cheat with is relative in its difficulty in lifting a weight that is lighter and difficult to move with tight form. The difference is that the strict form is more likely to engage the maximum muscle fibers of the target muscle, whereas the sloppy form with the “heavy” weight will lose much of this target while favoring questionable means of momentum and muscle recruitment. directed “to move. the weight.
What’s more, muscle growth for ‘bigger arms’ (and any other muscle) is not so much about “training heavy” as it is about “turning heavy weights into light.” Therefore, any weight that you currently find 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 something more to a ‘get big arms’ formula than what’s here? A little; But to borrow an old adage from medicine that says “first, do no harm” would be wise in your quest for bigger arms. And if you avoid all three of the mentioned mistakes (especially the overtraining mistake), your upper arms are likely to explode with new growth.
