SINCE THE MOMENT Since many guys lift weights for the first time, their main goal is to build their own set of action hero arms like Rambo or the Terminator, so the first instinct is to do curls, curls and more curls.
Sadly, instead of churning out pipes worthy of Schwarzenegger or Stallone, most men who take that path end up scratching their heads, looking at the same noodle arms in the mirror despite the thousands of reps they’ve done with their arms. From that harsh early lesson, it should be clear that plus Arm work isn’t necessarily better when it comes to increasing the size of your biceps and triceps. The key to effective weapons training, according to men’s health fitness manager Ebenezer Samuel, CSCSstart by eliminating any rookie mistakes.
“That’s something that happened to me when I started in the gym,” he says. “I was stacking arm after arm day after day and I kept asking myself the same question after months and months of training: ‘Why don’t my arms grow?'”
The key to answering that question is to avoid what Samuel calls these three deadly sins of training, and your arms will break in no time. “The best part about this is that once I got away from them, I was able to make a lot of progress,” says Samuel. “So avoid them now and I guarantee you’ll see your arms grow.”
3 arm training mistakes to avoid
You are training too heavy
To build muscle, you have to move heavy weights. However, there is a problem: as the weight continues to increase in isolation movements like bicep curls, you are more likely to change shape and allow your arms to start sharing the work with other muscle groups. Those times when you were moving the weight up in the final reps of a heavy set, your shoulders got more involved. By the end of the set, all the work going to your biceps or triceps can be significantly reduced.
Rule 1: Learn the fundamentals the right way, which in the case of arm workouts is knowing that the elbow is your starting point, according to Samuel. “That’s our key pivot point,” he says. “So think about making sure that all of your movements, whether you’re doing skull crushers, bicep curls, or hammer curls, start at the elbow. If you’re moving from the hips because we’re swinging with a bicep curl, that’s not going to create the effect you want for your biceps. It’s not going to make your arms grow.”
You focus too much on your arms
Logically, if you want big arms, you must train arms. How tempting was it in the beginning to sometimes rack up three or four arm days in a row, usually at the expense of missing leg days or skipping chest workouts?
Yet despite all that volume, it should never come at the expense of hard-hitting compound exercisesThink of deadlifts, presses, and rows. By training these hard, heavy exercises, you work multiple muscle groups at once, including your arms.
The best approach is to avoid overdoing your arm’s approach, says Samuel. Adding one or two tricep exercises after chest training, or using the same approach for biceps on back day will help. By the end of the week, you’ll have three or four smaller arm workouts on the books without skipping heavy exercises that stimulate muscle growth. “We have to get that total body stimulation because that’s what’s going to be key in helping you grow,” says Samuel.
You work through the motions too quickly
With all the time and effort put into growing your arms, why would you waste just one rep going through the motions of performing lazy curls or sloppy push-ups? Instead, it is imperative to focus on time under tension. This means that you slow down the movement to increase the amount of time your muscle spends under load. “I want you to think about squeezing every rep,” says Samuel. “If you skip that squeeze, you’re not going to get the most out of your arms. We want to think about slowing things down and appreciating the negative. That will also help us get other body parts out of the game and help us prevent cheating.”
So for each rep, strive for maximum contraction while squeezing at the top as hard as possible. Hold it for a fraction of a second before lowering (a count of two works here). This helps build up additional time under tension. “Because we are working with smaller muscles. We can’t go that heavy, but what we can do is rack up a little more time on each rep with that lighter weight. It’s going to develop the mind-muscle connection that you need.”
Jeff Tomko is a freelance fitness writer who has written for Muscle and Fitness, Men’s Fitness, and Men’s Health.
