The first thing you probably imagine yourself doing when working out in the gym, is let me guess… hammering out thousands and thousands of reps of every gym bro’s favorite exercise, bicep curls. The biceps is the most popular muscle to trained for individuals who are new to the gym and is it’s the stereotype symbol for muscularity within the eye of non-gym going masses. The reason is simple: everyone wants a big pair of arms to fill out their sleeves and look like a straight up badass.
You may think that hammering out curl after curl is the recipe to getting big arms and… you may be right, but you need to see the complete picture before all your do is curl your life away. While regularly doing curls will certainly not hurt the process of building big arms, there’s much more to it than that. In fact, most people wrongfully prioritize biceps training to get big, powerful arms, while it’s actually the triceps that makes up for 2/3rds of the upper arm size. The triceps is where you should put most of your attention to when trying to improve the girth of your sleeve fillers.
PRIORITIZE BIG COMPOUND LIFTS FIRST
Most people on a quest to blow up their arms make the mistake of focusing 80% on their training on training their arms directly and undertraining the rest of their body. What you must understand is that the arms are an extension of the core and therefore won’t be able to maximize their muscular size if the torso’s musculature doesn’t support it.
The biceps and triceps are “Santa’s little helper’s”. They are assistance muscles to help the big, powerful muscles of the core to fulfill their tasks. The chest, shoulders and back musculature is extremely important for successfully performing pushing and pulling movements. The majority of the strength you generate will come from your core’s musculature. If your core’s musculature is weak, your assistance muscles strength will be weak as well. Weakness results in a lack of muscular size, therefore, if your core is small and weak, you won’t be able to maximize your arm size. You should train your full body anyway, as a physique that is proportionate and balanced is the most aesthetically pleasing, the most functional and the most athletic. Imagine a guy with big gorilla arms and no muscular development whatsoever in the rest of his body… quite ridiculous I’d say.
To build a pair of big ass arms, you first need to pack on muscle mass on the big muscles of your upper body. I’m talking about the chest, deltoids and back musculature. These muscles are trained most efficiently with big compound movements such as the bench press, the overhead press, the (weighted) chin up and rowing movements. By becoming stronger on compound exercises, you will not only pack on muscle size on your big core muscles, but you’ll also add muscle size to your arms. Remember that I said that the arm musculature is meant to aid the core’s big muscles? Well, the involvement and assistance of the arms is the exact reason why getting stronger at your basic upper body compound movements will result in getting bigger arms as well.
Chin ups do a fantastic job at targeting the biceps effectively. Not only will your back’s musculature blow up and will you have a set of flaring cobra lats, your biceps will peak like crazy when hitting some good numbers on weighted chin ups. The bench press and overhead press primarily train the upper body’s core pushing muscles, but the triceps is very heavily involved in these movements. This is especially true when you narrow your grip to about shoulder width.
Now is the point where direct arm isolation work comes in. Even though your arms will definitely grow nicely from big compound movements, their size probably won’t be maximized by compound exercises alone. This especially true for the triceps. While chin ups can definitely maximize biceps size by themselves if done with a full range of motion and in both a neutral grip fashion and a supinated fashion, presses won’t do that with the triceps all by themselves, since certain heads get more stimulation than others from compound movements. In order to fully stimulate the tricep musculature to its maximum potential, we need to throw in a couple of direct exercises that target the directly. I think it’s important to throw in some isolation work for the biceps as well since a lot of people don’t hit all peaks of the biceps with their compound work alone. Therefore, to make sure development of both muscles is assured, perform isolation work for both the triceps and biceps. Total beginners may make great arm gains with compound exercises alone since they don’t haven’t packed on any size yet, but it’s clearly been scientifically proven that in trained individuals, upper arm size growth was superior when isolation work was included.
EXERCISE SELECTION FOR BIG ARMS
To begin our big arm quest, we will determine which exercises will give us the most bang for our buck so that we will get the best results with the least amount of exercises. There are thousands of variations of curls, but many of them are of no value. It’s not because your favorite fitness influencer is doing a Cirque du Soleil type of curl that looks astonishing, that it is therefore a practical and useful exercise. Just like anything in life that truly brings the best results in every single area, simplicity is key.
Compound exercises
TRICEPS | BICEPS |
Bench press | Chin ups |
Overhead press | Neutral grip chin up |
Dips | Ring pull up |
Push ups | Row |
Isolation exercises
TRICEPS | BICEPS |
Skull crushers (EZ bar or dumbbells) | EZ bar curls |
Cable rope/bar pushdowns | Dumbbell curls |
Overhead cable rope extensions | Hammer curl |
As you can tell, there aren’t any fancy, magical exercises involved that force you to use some fancy equipment. Your workouts should be centered around the basic, foundational multi joint movements that will trigger a lot of muscle growth at once. Centering your workouts around compound exercises will pack on slabs of muscle in the shortest amount of time.
Compound exercises, especially those for the pushing musculature such as the big pressing movements hit the triceps hard, but don’t hit all heads equally hard. Some people, like myself, who are core dominant will notice that their core takes over most of the work during compound exercises and sometimes the secondary muscles don’t get enough stimulation for maximal growth from compound exercises alone. That’s where supplementary isolation work comes into play. By adding in isolation work we make sure that all three heads of the triceps and both heads of the biceps are maximally stimulated. This will contribute to a more complete look and will reassure a beautifully sculpted pair of arms to match the size of your core’s musculature. Your body will be proportionate, visually pleasing and able to perform optimally as well from an athletic point of view.
CONCLUSION ON HOW TO GET BIG ARMS
Whether your training routine involves full body workouts, an upper/lower split or a push, pull, legs split, always make sure to prioritize compound exercises in your routines as they will give you the most bang for your buck and will be responsible for packing on big slabs of muscle in the least amount of time.
Isolation exercises are less taxing on the body and are more favorable to be performed after your compound work. By performing your isolation work first you may already fatigue the assistance muscles in the arms too much which will cause your performance to be impaired on your big lifts. This won’t work in your favor.
Big arms are the result of applying progressive overload and getting stronger on your big lifts and supplementing this with isolation exercises to give the arms more direct volume to bring up lagging areas that compound exercises won’t maximally target. As your big lifts go up, so will your isolation exercises. Isolation exercises follow the compound exercises’ lead in terms of strength, since the arm musculature are assistants to the big core muscles.
Do the work and be consistent. The results will follow.
Kevin Mahjoubi