OnFitness Magazine - January/February 2022 - 70

WWW.ONFITNESSMAG.COM | VOL 22 NO 4 | 2022 70
Muscle Science
BICEPS BRAWN
Five strategies that will raise your arm development to the next level.
Joan Baxter
Do you hassle about
building brawny
arms? You're not
alone. The icon of
human strength is the
flexed biceps. Many
people focus on their
arms, a favorite area
to train. In fact, for young men, this is
probably the muscle group of choice to
train. If you are searching for a way to take
your arm development to the next level,
here are five rules to building brawny arms
quickly.
Most people get fixated on building
huge biceps and start putting in a lot of
time on their arms.
Unfortunately, arms training works
inversely. The more time you spend here,
the less productive your arm workout
becomes. Some people then compound
this mistake by increasing the workload to
try to force something to happen.
What they end up doing is overtraining
the arms, and this halts the gains. Arms
that are overtrained not only fail to grow,
but they may also lose some gains if
they're severely overtrained.
Understanding this is a key step
forward. The move away from overtraining
may mean fewer overall sets and exercises,
an extra day of rest between arm training
workouts, or perhaps both.
This fits in well with the first rule of
not overtraining the arms. There is no
reason to expand an arm workout. For arm
training, the length of the workout
computes into loss of gains. Instead of
long sessions, concentrate on workout
density, go hard, then go home. This
translates into very intense training.
You want to get a strong overload -
that's different from overtraining - on
your biceps and triceps in a short amount
of time. You want your arms to be pumped
full of blood. Pushing the pump comes
from intense, focused training, and a
passionate push to work in the pain zone.
The key here is to mix the training
between heavy lifting and higher-repetition
lifting to get a maximum workout in a
shorter time.
Another factor in making the most of a
short workout session is minimal rest
between sets. This works best on small
muscle groups. To put the whole process
together into a workout package, condense
or collapse the training time period, but
not the intensity. Focus on the idea that
duration is decreased and intensity is
increased.
This is a key mistake novice and even
some long-time enthusiasts make -
centering everything on their biceps. The
biceps are great, but the bulk of brawn lies
in the triceps.
Your triceps make up roughly twothirds
of your upper arm. If your focus is
on your biceps, then thirty-three percent of
your arm is getting the maximum attention
while the larger mass is being neglected.
To make quick progress, reverse that
approach. Spend most of your arm training
on your triceps, and watch your arms burst
with brawn. There's nothing wrong with
working your biceps, but they should fall
into the second tier as far as the order of
importance.
In most lifting situations, one of two
forces is moving the weight - momentum
or muscle.
When it comes to building the biceps
and triceps, momentum is the enemy. To
force the biceps and triceps to grow is not
easy, and if momentum gets involved,
things become exponentially worse.
Muscles need to be under constant tension,
and momentum takes the tension away.
Keep constant tension on the muscle.
However, often a trainee tries to unload
that tension by cheating. Left to their own
devices, many trainees will cheat the
weight upward by whatever means they
can employ. And one of the most common
is to bounce the weight at the bottom of a
movement. This might be coming off the
bench in a close-grip bench press, or on
the way up in a curl.
Another cheating tactic is when a
trainee heaves the weight upward with a
big assist from their hips to help get the
weight started on the way up.
These cheating movements take
advantage of momentum as a type of
leverage force to move the weight. And in
each situation, the muscle gets to relax.
Your muscles should not be allowed to
relax under the weight load, as this defeats
the whole purpose of stressing the
muscles.
The biceps is a unique muscle, they're
stimulated from both a locked wrist
position and an articulating wrist action.
Many people simply stick with the
standard hand position. However, by
incorporating some supination/pronation
into your arm training, you can add a new
degree of stimulation to the workout. This
was a favorite tactic of Arnold in crafting
his brawny arms via dumbbell curls. And
twisting your wrist isn't limited to just
biceps training. Flare the wrists outward at
the bottom of the rope pull-down for the
triceps and hit them differently.
Building brawny arms is one of the
prime objectives of many people, but most
won't get there unless they're on the right
path. Z
Standing
dumbbell curl
Stand with a dumbbell in
each hand, your elbows close
to your torso and palms facing
each other. Keeping your upper arms
stationary, curl the weights up while
contracting your biceps. Continue to curl,
rotating your palms upward until your biceps are
fully contracted and the dumbbells are at shoulder
level. Hold the contracted position, squeezing your
biceps, then slowly lower the weight back to the
starting position and repeat.
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OnFitness Magazine - January/February 2022

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