A big, strong upper body has always been the baseline for bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts. From a wide chest to a pair of round shoulders, these muscle groups set the stage for your physique. Sure, abs are always a popular muscle to build up — but how often are you walking around with your shirt off?
When you’re building your body, you need to be practical, and strength comes from the arms. So let’s dive in to the basics of building bigger arms.
First off, it will never happen overnight. Those coveted, muscular arms take a lot of work and dedication. But with patience and perseverance we can help you build bigger biceps, stronger forearms, and powerful triceps.
Biceps
The bicep muscle consists of two muscles the short head bicep brachii and the long head bicep brachii. Both of these heads extend from the scapula, which is often referred to as the shoulder blade, to the forearm.
Triceps
The tricep is the large muscle on the back of your upper arm, directly opposite of the bicep. Think underarm flab that jiggles around when you shake your arm. The tricep is comprised of three muscle heads. The long head, the lateral head, and the medial head. Each of these heads work independently of to extend the arm from the elbow joint.
Forearms
The forearm is as single muscle that connects the hand to the muscles to the upper arms. This muscle can be separated into two parts the anterior and posterior or front or back. The muscles in the forearm contains many muscles that pretty much responsible for controlling the hands and fingers. The strength of your grip is directly related to the strength of your forearm.
Understanding the arm and the muscles that allow the arm to function is important to building bigger arms. Breaking down how each muscle interacts with one another we can now take a logically approach to training them properly and how to get bigger arms.
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Use Blood Flow Restriction Training
Blood flow restriction training is one technique that works great for the arms. When you restrict blood flow to a muscle, you are forcing blood to pool in the muscle—giving you an unbelievable pump.
When using blood flow restriction training, we are not allowing blood to escape the veins; arteries however, will continue to deliver blood to the muscle. It sounds like some sort of torture, but by occluding a muscle, you are tricking your body to use large fast-twitch muscle fibers, which will result in crazy growth. Another benefit to this type of training is that you will be using 50 percent of your normal weight. This type of training will allow your joints to recover while taxing your body and increasing the size of your arms. Try a superset of triceps and biceps. Use knee wraps high up on the arms and tighten the wraps. You want the wraps tight enough so that it’s uncomfortable but not overly painful. You will be using a rope pushdown for triceps and performing standing dumbbell curls for biceps.
The Workout
Tricep Rope Pressdown 1 x 30 (superset with dumbbell curls)
Standing Dumbbell Curls 1 x 30
Tricep Rope Pressdowns 1 x 15 (superset with dumbbell curls)
Standing Dumbbell Curls 1 x 15
Continue you this until you complete three sets of 15 reps, and then pull the tourniquet off.
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Lebedev Roman Olegovich
Increase Your Volume
Volume has been shown to have direct correlation with muscle growth. This means if you’re doing eight sets of arms once per week and are getting no results, you need to up your volume. I recommend adding additional sets on another day a week for arms. I found training arms three times per week has been ideal for growth. An important point is to make sure you slowly walk your volume up over time. Do not just jump into three days per week without slowly increasing your volume otherwise you risk injury.
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Utilize All Angles
The primary function of your bicep is to lift the forearm toward the shoulders and to rotate the wrist. The primary function of the tricep is to fully extend the elbow. These motions are simple but you want to make sure you’re training your arms from all angles. With your biceps, you want to perform curls on an incline and try to get a full stretch. Performing a chin-up or high cable pulleys will hit the bicep from a higher angle. The same goes for triceps; performing an overhead tricep extension will stimulate different heads of the muscle.
Ultimate Angle Workout
Incline Dumbbell Curls 4 x 8-10
Bodyweight Tricep Dips 4 x 15-20
Standing Barbell Curls 4 x 6-8
Narrow-grip Bench Press 4 x 6-8
High Cable Pulley Curls 4 x 12
Ez-Bar French Press 4 x 12
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Tim Tadder / Getty
Superset
To stimulate arm growth, you’ll need to increase the overall volume for arm training. An easy way to do this without spending three hours in the gym, is by supersetting bicep and tricep routines. This will engorge your arms with blood, delivering tons of nutrients to them. When we perform a tricep movement, we fully stretch out the bicep. When we do a curling movement, we stretch out the triceps; this creates an antagonistic effect that makes training more effective.
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Use the Shock Method
Your body doesn’t like change—it doesn’t want 20 inch arms and it will fight you because carrying around that much muscle is metabolically expensive. In order to force growth in the arms, it’s a good idea to throw in more intense routines every couple of workouts. Shocking methods are designed to cause severe overload to the muscles. Supersets, dropsets, pyramids, running the rack and many more can be just what you need to get your arms to grow.
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MRBIG_PHOTOGRAPHY / Getty
One Inch in One Day Growth
Once a month perform the “Gaining One Inch in One Day” routine. This program has gotten a lot of hate from people but it has a lot of merit. This program was designed to increase arm volume and increase your arm size through sheer overload.
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Thomas Barwick / Getty
Eat Like a Machine
Bottom line: if you want to get huge you’re going to have to eat like a madman. Eighty percent of the results you’ll see in the mirror are based off your nutritional habits. Make sure you’re pounding a ton of nutrient-dense food every day along with high quality protein sources. Keep track of how many calories you are consuming, and if you fail to gain at least one-half a pound per week, bump your daily calories up by 200-300. In order to gain one solid inch on your arms, you are going to have to gain 10 pounds of bodyweight. That much weight will not happen if you’re eating like a school girl.
