Let’s get straight to it: You’re looking for the best workout for big arms, and you’ve come to the right place. But before you screenshot the exercises below, grab your gym bag and head to the weight room, there are a few things you should know.
If building big arms were as easy as banging out bicep curls, a lot more people would have them. But what we do know from peer-reviewed, published scientific research is that the best way to build muscle isn’t so much about the particular exercises you do as it is about the way you do them.
“The key is exercise selection,” said Luke Carlson, founder and CEO of . discover strengthThey say. “Almost every guy is doing the right exercises. They’re just not doing it in a way that promotes muscle growth.”
When it comes to exercise selection, it’s not just about the biceps. “Many people make the mistake of focusing a little too much on the biceps. The triceps actually make up the bulk of the arm – about two thirds –” says Antony Brown, personal training leader lifetime In Lake Zurich, Illinois.
“Most times, when people say they want bigger arms, they’re thinking about their biceps,” says Carlson. “If you want to make your arms look more shaped, which is exactly what we’re talking about, training your triceps contributes a lot to that look.”
Read on for more exercise advice from Carlson and Brown, along with a quick refresher on key muscle-building strategies to ensure your gains last when you leave the gym.
Train to (or near) failure
Research It is very clear that mechanical stress is a powerful driver of muscle growth. Mechanical strain refers to the involuntary slowing of your repetitions caused by fatigue of your muscles. This is not the same as timing under tension, which usually involves deliberately slowing down the speed of your reps (and, FYI, has not been shown to affect muscle growth).
As you might have guessed, maximizing mechanical stress means training until failure, or at least within one or two repetitions of it. But the good news is that weight and repetitions have no impact on results – meaning, you’ll get the same benefit from reaching failure with five heavy repetitions as you will with 20 light repetitions. “You have some autonomy here,” says Carlson. “If you prefer to lift heavier weights and do four or five repetitions, that’s fine. If you prefer to use lighter weights and do more repetitions, that’s fine too. The science is clear: It’s exactly the same.”
lower, slower
studies Showed us that the eccentric, or lower part of the rep is where the real magic happens. Yet most people still assign this phase of the rep to gravity. “Nobody does it, because people are ignorant,” Carlson says. “How do we learn to lift weights? We just look at the guy in the gym who has slightly bigger biceps than us, and that’s what he’s doing. He lifts and drops the weight. By and large, exercise people don’t read scientific research.”
To maximize the eccentric side of your reps, Carlson suggests “consider raising for about two seconds, lowering for four seconds, and going to the point of failure and then doing some eccentric work after that.” With the help of a gym friend, you can even isolate the eccentric phase completely. “If we really want to stimulate size in the biceps and triceps, we have to do a lot of eccentric-accent or eccentric-only training,” says Carlson. “Having a training partner lift a weight for you, and you lower it for 10 seconds, is about as valuable as it gets.”
