Your 6 Secrets to Big Arms

Think building big arms is all about choosing the right exercises? Think again. Here are 6 keys to adding an extra inch to your biceps.

1) LESS VOLUME!

Small muscles require less volume, and recover faster.
Basic logic says, a smaller muscle has less overall total
volume of muscle fibers. It takes LESS overall stimulus
to fatigue these muscles and less overall training volume
to exhaust glycogen stores (stored muscle energy).

2) Use correct technique

Lift and lower the weight slowly in a controlled, focused manner. If the weights you’re using are too heavy, you’re only training your ego. This will never build big arms. To develop your arms fully, start every repetition with your arms fully extended. This makes the exercise harder, and targets all the fibres in the muscle. If you’re using too much weight (like most people do) you’ll end up doing partial repetitions, and swinging your body all over the place but most importantly of all you’ll put yourself in real danger of getting injured. Reduce your weights and do the exercise properly.

3) Bump up the intensity

Reaching the point of muscle failure is critical in the growth equation as opposed to simply ending the set when discomfort sets in. While you don’t want to take every set past muscle failure, strategically taking 1–2 sets of every exercise beyond failure can speed growth if you can withstand the intense pain that comes with this type of training. With each of the biceps exercises listed we recommend a strategy for working past failure, although there are certainly plenty of others to choose from that range from forced reps to negatives, drop sets and partials.

4) ARMS RECEIVE A LOT OF STIMULUS ON A REGULAR BASIS

Arms receive a lot of stimulus on a regular basis.
For most people, this tends to occur in the middle
of the range of motion where the muscles are strongest.
In order to get the arms to grow and respond, it is
necessary to subject them to a different type of stimulus.
One of the best ways to improve arm development is to
subject them to more tension and continuous tension at
the extremes of the range of motion (a.k.a, when a muscle
is fully lengthened or fully shortened — where muscles
are weakest). This will allow for greater time under tension
as well as targeting different points of the strength curve
to force the nervous system to adapt and stimulate new
muscle growth.

5)Train the arms a maximum of twice per week

The muscles in your arms are more prone to overtraining than other muscles of the body, mainly because they’re worked hard during pulling and pushing movements, such as the bench press and lat pulldown. But so many guys think that training their arms 3-4 times a week is the best way to get them to grow. Do this, and you’re setting yourself up for major disappointment! Stick to 1-2 arm workouts per week. This gives your arms the recovery time they need to grow bigger and stronger.

6) Get out of your comfort zone

While a workout may at first seem like it really works, after a while your body grows accustomed to it and any changes in muscle strength and growth begin to slow down. Rather than doing the same workout again, it’s time to introduce some changes into your routine. Here, we recommend several alternatives to each move to reduce your chance of hitting a training plateau and ensuring those gains continue.