OnFitness Magazine - March/April 2022 - 63

63 WWW.ONFITNESSMAG.COM | VOL 22 NO 5 | 2022
B
allistic pump in less
time: This fits in well with
the first rule of not
overtraining your arms. There's 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 very hard,
then go home. This translates into
very intense training.
You want to get a strong overload
(quite different from overtraining, by
the way) 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
amount of 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, but not the
intensity. Key on the idea that
duration is decreased and intensity is
increased.
I
nclude constant tension: In
most lifting situations one of two
forces is moving the weight,
momentum, or muscle.
When it comes to building your
biceps and triceps, momentum is the
enemy. To force your 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. Many of us cheat the weight
upward by whatever means we can
employ. 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
we heave the weight upward with a
big assist from your hips to help get
the weight started on the way
upward.
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 your muscles.
Maintain constant tension.
C
ontrol overtraining: Most
of us get fixated on building
huge biceps and start putting
in a lot of time on our arms.
Unfortunately, arms training
works inversely. The more time you
spend here, the less productive your
arm workout becomes. Some of us
then compound this mistake by
increasing the workload to try to
force something to happen.
What we end up doing is
overtraining our arms, and this halts
the gains. Arms that are overtrained
not only fail to grow, but they may
also lose some gains if they are
severely overtrained.
Understand 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.
mphasize your triceps:
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 your triceps.
Look at your arm, or someone
else's. The triceps make up roughly
two-thirds of the upper arm. If your
focus is on your biceps, then thirtythree
percent of your arm is getting
the maximum attention while the
larger mass is being neglected.
To help 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 to
order of importance.
ositions of your wrist:
Your biceps are a very unique
muscle, they're stimulated from
both a locked wrist position as well as
an articulating wrist action. Many of
us 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. 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
differently.
Building brawny arms is one of
the prime objectives of many of us,
but we won't get there unless we're on
the right path. Knowing the science
can indeed produce brawny arms. Z
P
E
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OnFitness Magazine - March/April 2022

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