The Workout Plan for Bigger Arms, Faster

10 Rules and 6 Lifts to Biceps and Triceps

Do you feel like your arm growth is slowing down? Don’t look around for crazy solutions. This is a great workout for triceps and biceps.

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A Blueprint for Bigger Arms

Have trouble building your triceps or biceps muscles? Simple rules and exercises will ensure success. This is your guide to bigger arms. There are ten rules to follow, but here’s a one-sentence summary:

Varietate your grips, pay attention to arm alignment, use dumbbells, bars and cables. Do 8-12 reps and try to feel each exercise exactly where it should be.

First, we’ll review each rule, then I’ll give you a workout plan and describe each exercise in more detail.

The 10 Rules for Big Arms

They are not in any particular order.

1. Vary Your Grips

One smart man once stated that the definition of insane was repeating the same thing over and expecting different results. Varying your grip with arm exercises won’t have some magical “muscle confusion” However, it will let you target different areas of the arms.

If you kept steering your car to the left, you’d get more wear and tear on one side. This is true for your grips and angles when you curl or extend your elbows.

You won’t get cranky elbows if you change your grip every time you do the same workout. Keep it simple. To get more growth and less pain, you can use a combination of underhand, overhand, and hammer grip positions.

2. Pay attention to alignment

The hinges on your front door are like your elbows: they’re designed to only move in a certain way. Proper alignment of your joints can help you train longer and prevent you from having cranky elbows. You can test your elbows with different grips and attachments for simple exercises like tricep pushdowns.

Your elbows will feel less stressed if you are able to draw straight lines from your wrists, elbows and shoulders. Even biceps curling with a straight bar isn’t ideal for some folks.

To return to rule 1, you can use specialty bars in your workouts and have different grips and attachments.

3. You can change the resistance

Different resistances can provide more or less force during different parts of an exercise. If you curl with a dumbbell, your biceps will be the hardest hit at the middle of the curl. You can change the portion of the movement that is most taxed by using a cable, band or kettlebell.

You can change your body’s position to alter the maximum load. A mix of resistance types will help you get the best arm workout. Different ranges of motion are better for your arms. Some exercises will load the stretch portion, others the peak contraction part, and some will hit them in the middle.

4. Think Shoulder Angle

This is vital. This is crucial because both your long head and your triceps crosses the shoulder joint. You can influence the recruitment of these muscles. Here’s what to remember without getting too deep into the details:

You should do a mixture of exercises that keep your arms at your sides, such as pushdowns, dips and close-grip bench presses. Also, try exercises that have your arms more overhead, like extensions, skull crushers and skull crushing.).

You can strengthen your biceps by doing some exercises with your arms behind your body (e.g. incline curls or cable-behind curls), or with your arms straight out (Scott curls or preacher curls or Hercules curls).

5. Feel It!

What was the last time your biceps were burning before your shoulders and forearms? Your biceps and triceps don’t give a damn that you want them to grow. They don’t care how much weight you’re able to curl. They’ll remain stubborn unless you send them the right signals.

Your arms will start growing again when you care less about the weight and more about the actual tension you’re putting onto them. Of course, the weight you’re using factors into that equation, but so does being able to contract that muscle hard through entire ranges of motion.

It sounds simple, but if you’re not squeezing the heck out of your biceps on every curl and triceps on any press, extension, or pushdown, you’re missing a trick.

It takes a lot of effort to get up and down. If you can maintain that for every rep and continue to add a little weight or reps each week, it’ll be a win for your arms.

6. Don’t Neglect Your Forearms

If you want bigger arms, you can’t forget everything south of your elbows, so hit your forearms. Second, if you have weak forearms, then your biceps and even triceps won’t be receiving sufficient stimulation.

You can target your forearms if they are weak. If you don’t have the time or desire to improve your forearms, then adapt your biceps and triceps exercises.

This is possible by using thicker bars or curls that challenge your wrist extensors. I like to use curls that have an overhand grip. Zottman curls.

7. Training Triceps and Biceps in the same workout

It’s old school, but it works. You could add biceps work to your pulling workouts, and triceps to your pressing workouts. If you want to improve any of these areas, you must prioritize.

Your arms will get plenty of blood, which will help you shift your focus and improve your training. There’s nothing more motivating than some localized blood occlusion and walking out of the gym with a sleeve-busting pump.

8. Do not overthink the reps

Six reps per set is enough to build muscle, according to our research. If the set fails, you can still build muscle with sets of 20-30.

Some muscles and individuals might respond best to higher or lower rep ranges, but even if that’s true, it might only make a one percent difference. Don’t overthink the reps. Instead, focus on the importance of effort. The best reps for you are those you’ll work hardest for and maintain the highest quality doing.

There’s one rep range that works pretty much every time, though, and it won’t disappoint you. Just hit 8-12 reps per set, and don’t overthink it.

Try the Method 8-12-8 For a win, choose a weight that you can lift for 8 reps. For an easy win, choose a weight that you can lift 8 reps of, then, when you have reached 12 reps over several weeks, select a heavier weight that can take you back to 8 reps.

9. Don’t Overthink Rest Either

We can lift more weight and possibly produce better-quality sets if we have longer rest periods. Shorter rest periods, on the other hand, allow for a more focused and purposeful workout. This will result in a greater pump and more sweat on your floor. You can rest as much as you like between sets.

You can choose to rest for longer periods (3-5 minutes), but this is not a build-up to a maximal effort lift.

If you want to keep the rest periods shorter (around 45 seconds), that’s fine too. Keep your reps quality high. Fatigue doesn’t help. Most people recommend that you rest between sets for your arms. If you use supersets or intensifying techniques, it may be as long as 1-3 minutes.

10. Pick Good Exercises

The six exercises in the video may be all you’ll ever need.

The Workout Plan

You’ll do 4 working sets of each of the exercises in the video in the same order shown. That’s 12 sets for biceps and 12 for triceps.

Do each exercise as a superset to improve your workout’s overall quality and efficiency. If you don’t have the means to superset, then doing each exercise one at a time will work fine. Here’s what it looks like on paper:

How to slot it into your Week

This workout can be added to your regular workouts for an additional day, or for as long as 4-6 weeks. You can add more exercises to the program after four weeks. It can be used as part of an upper/lower split training program using a schedule like this:

• Day 1: Upper
• Day 2: Lower
• Day 3: Only Conditioning or Discount
• Day 4: Upper
• Day 5: Lower
• Day 6: Arm Workout
• Day 7: No Charge

Breakdown of Exercises

1. Narrow-Grip Floor Press

While dips could work equally well at developing your triceps, these presses are far more useful for the average lifter since they don’t beat up your shoulders as much.

The floor press restricts shoulder movement while loading the area where your triceps dominate. You can also choose the grip width to make them more comfortable for your elbows, unlike many dipping bars. A straight bar, thick or curved bar are all options. Swiss bar.

2. Dumbbell Hammer Curl

Dumbbell hammer curls can be a great way to build your arm strength. These curls target the brachialis, brachioradialis, and brachioradialis portions of your biceps more than regular underhand curls. They’re a good choice for developing arm “thickness.”

Since you can typically go heavier with hammer curls than with a regular underhand grip, you’ll start with these. Try throwing some Fat Gripz To strengthen your grip and forearms, grab your dumbbells.

3. Lying Ez Bar Triceps Extension

Take your arms overhead to hit the triceps’ long head in more of a lengthened position. The EZ-bar gives you more grip options than a straight one. You can align your elbows with the EZ bar to reduce stress and stimulate your triceps.

Try different grips to find the one that aligns your elbows well. If you don’t like using the EZ-bar, use dumbbells instead.

4. Incline Dumbbell Curl

To hit another angle, switch to an underhand grip. To bring your elbows further back, set your bench on an incline. This loads the biceps’ long head in a lengthened position and emphasizes more of the bottom to midrange.

You’ll explore different degrees of shoulder external rotation here as well. A smoother and more powerful contraction can be achieved by turning the dumbbells slightly outward, as demonstrated in the video.

5. Rope Triceps Pushdown

There are plenty of arguments about what is and isn’t the correct technique when doing the pushdown. And, while you’re arguing whether or not your elbows should be fixed by your sides or kept slightly more forwards, there’s someone else out there spending that time just putting in the extra work.

Each technique has its advantages. In the video, I’m keeping my elbows forward to keep the load high at the bottom of the pushdown.

6. One-Arm Palms Down Cable Curl

This is the only exercise here that’s somewhat unconventional, but that’s only because you’re not accustomed to seeing it as often as the others.

It is a great idea to include more overhand-grip curls. They strengthen the wrist extensors in your forearms. “shy” The brachialis is a muscle. You’d be surprised what would happen to your arms just by sprinkling in a few sets of curls at the end of your workouts using an overhand grip.

You can keep your elbow in tight to your body by using the one-arm cable variant. If you have weak brachialis or brachialis, this can be difficult to do. You might find that you have more elbow flare when performing hammer or palms-down curls. The cable also allows you to adjust your grip to the most comfortable angle.

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It’s great! The novel approach of attacking the goal of bigger arms by… shockingly… directly training arms!

Well-written, good sir, and I like the sample week that lets you slot arms in without going full bodypart split (which I like, but get why folks don’t want to).

Pass to touchdown

But I stumbled a little here IMO. It’s hard to hit failure 4x in a row at the same 8-12 rep range if Training to fail actually. You could lose weight but I usually advocate against this DB Hogging behavior.

However, solid exercise selections are important.

I don’t understand this one – why not just put the ones you’re done with back? You might have misunderstood what I meant

It sounds great in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice.

You might not be using a strong enough strategy to deter others, I suggest. Maybe with bigger arms…

I jest