How To Build Arm Muscle - 3 Tricks For Adding Mass to Your Arms
Bodybuilders have developed lots of tricks and techniques for increasing the intensity of their upper-arm workouts past the point where inexperienced weight lifters would fail. Here are three of the best ways to make sure you are not wasting your workouts:
Grip strength is the key to progress
Your forearms are the key that unlocks upper-arm size. Without a strong grip, your upper arms -- the biceps and triceps -- won't get enough training stress to really make them grow. In short, unless you have a strong grip and lots of muscular endurance in your forearms, they'll give out before your larger, stronger biceps and triceps are fully exhausted. And when that happens, growth in your upper arms stops dead.
So, with that in mind, let me show you how to keep your upper-arm gains coming, long after they would have stalled if you don't use these techniques.
One, you must work on your forearm conditioning. Forearms are responsible for grip, and without a strong grip you're not going to get anywhere.
High-rep sets of forearm curls are the best way to build strength and prevent injuries in the forearms, wrists, and hands. Since there is very little muscle in this part of the body, you'll want to work out in a way that builds strength and resilience in the connective tissue (the ligaments and tendons that facilitate your grip) of the lower arms, wrists, hands, and fingers.
Using an ez-curl bar (or, less ideally, a straight barbell), sit on a bench with your forearms resting on your knees and perform high-rep sets of wrist curls. Keep the reps above 20. Remember that you're not training the muscular strength as much as you are training the endurance and the tendons.
Reverse wrist curls are good too, but they mostly train the muscles and connective tissue that strengthens the thumb, and as such aren't quite as important as orthodox wrist curls. Behind the back forearm curls are a favorite of most advanced bodybuilders. Use them when you're after strength rather than conditioning.
Always do your forearm training after your upper-arm training. If you do it first, you'll be unable to give anywhere near 100% effort on your biceps and/or triceps exercises. In addition, since the forearms take longer to recover from intense exercise than most other muscle groups, you are probably better off training them heavily only once per week.
Finally, to really increase your grip strength, get some inexpensive weight lifting straps. This way, you will have a rock-solid grip without needing to worry about hand strength. In fact, you can train to increase your grip strength in various ways, but it's still a good idea to use wrist straps during your heaviest sets of "pulling" exercises like pull-ups.
Get big biceps by showing them no mercy
Your bicep growth will stall if you don't fully exhaust them every time you work out. It's not enough to just go through the motions and do what you did the last time you were in the gym. Instead, you have to keep pushing for a new level of accomplishment. If you didn't do more than you did the last time, you're not making progress.
But the problem with pushing to the max is that it can often put a lot of strain on the elbows and wrists. Long-term biceps training is notoriously hard on these joints. Thankfully, bodybuilders have come up with a simple solution: the ez curl bar.
EZ-curl bars are cambered: the gripping surfaces are angled so your wrists and elbows are properly oriented during your arm exercises. When you lift using one of these cambered bars, you'll be able to lift more weight because of the minimum strain on your joints.
This is probably the simplest and most effective way to increase the intensity of your arm workouts without increasing the risk of injury.
Tricep training -- it's all about angles
Good tricep training is difficult. It's hard to get a full contraction of the triceps using dumbbells or a barbell. Angling your body so you get resistance through a full range of motion sometimes makes you feel like a contortionist. It helps if you have an incline bench, but it's still tough on the joints.
But again, with an EZ-curl bar, you make your triceps training much more effective because you can do close-grip bench presses (which heavily stress the triceps), then lying (or standing) triceps extensions to blast the remaining stubborn muscle fibers. Don't overlook the value of an ez bar for triceps training.
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