Arms day aka bro day is where we work on our gunz and with summer right around the corner we felt like it was time to talk about exercising our second amendment rights.
For bodybuilders, arms are probably the crowning achievement to a physique. Getting a six pack is just a matter of time when it comes to your diet and getting to below 10% bodyfat, but having large arms is one of the most effective weapons in a bodybuilder's arsenal.
For all other sports, big arms do play a great role in many of the other exercises but arm exercises can be more of an auxiliary movement that can be thrown in if time allows and doesn’t require as much attention.
Biceps are useful in helping stabilize the bench press movement and triceps are also useful as well.
And what about the forearms...you know, the calves of the upper body?
Strong forearms can also equal more grip strength which is very important when deadlifting.And the way you build bigger forearms is not through those silly curls, but through heavy grip work...which means NO STRAPS on the deadlift! This drives me (PP) crazy.
Also, we always think biceps on arms...but ⅔ of the upper arm is triceps.
Favorite arm exercises
DAVE
- Dips
- Tricep Press Down
- Alternate arm bicep curl
EVERETT
- With shoulder issues, dips are out.
- Mostly barbell curls for biceps, dumbbell curls too
- Close grip bench press for triceps
Least fav arm exercises
DAVE -
- Machine bicep curls - usually doesn’t fit quite right to my body and too isolating
Can powerlifters benefit from doing an arms day
- Arms play a role in bench press, particularly the lock out.
- Building arms - a personal goal of mine this summer - can keep you from attaining to the “t-rex powerlifter” look.
The pump...is it useful for anything else besides appearances?
What kind of rep ranges do arms respond best to? How many days a week should I train arms?
From LBEB - What I am suggesting you do is train in a high rep range of anywhere from 10-15 reps. I hope everyone is ready for this because I’m going to use a body builder term here: when doing direct arm work you want to only train for the pump. Arms do not respond well to low repetitions and heavy weight, maxing out on a curl is just asking for an injury.
I wonder if RPE type training could apply for arms the same way it does for larger muscle groups. As far as the number of times per week, go as often as you feel like you can as you are recovering.
From Dr. Israetel, “When I started to up my frequency, most of my fast recovering body parts particularly the biceps, delts...they exploded. Fast recovering because they are smaller muscles, they take on less damage and their growth curves are really short. I remember when i used to train biceps once a week and literally just nothing happened and I did like 5 exercises, 5 sets each. Then I started training twice a week and things got better. I started training biceps and delts 4 times a week, now on Facebook people are like, “what happened to your arms, they got huge.” What me, with big arms, nothing really made sense to me. High frequency training, especially with arms, a small muscle group, it makes sense. It makes sense mechanistically, it makes sense with theoretically, it makes sense with the experimental data, and it works. So, my 2 big messages for today in bodybuilding, find out what you can recover from, don’t go overboard, don’t go underboard, and try to expand the frequency from average of 2-4 times a for body parts. For the bigger body parts, chest, back, legs, maybe close to two. For most folks maybe three. For the smaller body parts - arms, shoulders, calves, you can train 3-5 times per week no problem, certainly 4 for most people. Fiber types can have a big role in that too. Calves are almost entirely slow-twitch fibers so they’re going to recover much fastrings compared to hamstrings (don’t train hamstrings more than twice a week).
