5 Tips For Building Bigger Arms

Wanting bigger arms is right up there with losing belly fat as the holy grail of fitness goals. For every person who wants to lose weight, there’s someone else who wants to feed the pythons, with a whole lot of crossover between the two as well. So I’m going to give you 5 tips for building bigger arms because lets face it, I’m a real people pleaser. Let's start with the basics. Build Upper Body Compound Strength First of all you need good basic strength on the traditional big upper body movements. You’re not going to have big arms if you’ve got a puny push and pull on you. You want to be working to and well beyond a bodyweight bench press, 0.75x bodyweight strict press and 5-10 strict pull-ups as a minimum. The stimulus your biceps and triceps will get from exercises like those, alongside dips, press-ups, barbell rows and single arm rows is going to hugely outweigh any direct arm work you do until you’ve got that base strength. And don’t just chase the numbers and rush up there. These need to be controlled lifts, and they are going to be the basis of your programming for years to come, so work on perfecting them right from the get go. Use a Full Range of Motion (ROM) This is hugely important and the most common mistake you will see people making when doing curls because you picked up a weight that is too damn heavy. You see it in a group setting all the time. Announce the curls and no-one ever wants to pick up anything less than 10kg, regardless of sets, reps, tempos or their strength. They then proceed to keep their elbow bent throughout every set, and never fully stretch the bicep ready for it to contract fully. Instead, you will see the upper arm move backwards on descent, the weight reach the thigh to give the impression they’ve reached full extension, then the inevitable upper arm swing to get the weight moving again (because it’s too damn heavy). Go lighter and use the full range of motion. Get stronger over that full range of motion, then pick a heavier weight in a few week’s time. Use Variation in Your Curl Grips When hitting the biceps, you want to be working through all 3 grips on a regular basis. These are supinated (palms up), pronated (palms down) and neutral (palms facing each other, also known as “Hammer Grip”). This will get a great spread of activation across the fibres of the biceps, forearms, and also the brachialis which lies between your biceps and triceps and is hit particularly well with pronated curls. The variation will also help keep your elbows happy. You can mainly focus on supinated and hammer, with a regular little sprinkling of pronated as the cherry on top. Focus on Triceps as well as Biceps. The common bro quote is that the triceps are two thirds of your upper arm, and that’s pretty much true. But simply if you want large and fully developed arms, you’re going to need to work your triceps as much as your biceps. The good news here is that supersets can be really effective on arm specific finishers. For every set of biceps you do, you can do a set of triceps and keep good attention on both by default. Allow no rest between exercises then 30-60 seconds between rounds, and after 2-3 rounds you’ll be definitely be doing some valuable arm work. This works great on smaller isolation movements such as pushdowns, extensions and skull crushers. Start in Shortened AND Lengthened Positions. Spending a little time to understand the origins and insertions of any muscle will help you to understand how to train it better. Biceps and triceps are no different. The biceps have a long and a short head and the triceps a long, medial and lateral head. Google it now and have a look to see what I mean… I’ll wait… Cool. So to make this really simple, to get the most out of your bicep curls, you need to incorporate curls where your upper arm are both inline/in-front of your body (standing and preacher curls for example) AND variations where your upper arm is BEHIND your body (like a seated incline curl). For triceps we are looking at exercises that have your upper arm inline/in-front of your body (pushdowns and presses for example) and exercises where you are reaching up and over your head (like skull crushers and French presses). This will give you a good spread of work on each head of each muscle, and help you build an all-round bigger, strong and fuller set of arms. And while that is a lot of information to take in and apply. Just remember that you don’t need to be doing all of these things at once. If you’re training upper body twice a week in an upper/lower split, or three times a week in a full body routine, then hitting 3 rounds of an arm superset after your compounds in two of those sessions that’ll likely be plenty of volume. Then just switch the exercises you use every 3-4 weeks to cover all the bases listed above. Just make sure you don’t neglect any one area for too long. Thanks! Ian