Building Massive Biceps : Training the Arms

If the big arm guys and the lessons learnt from SEO's are anything to go by, pumping the arms is the best approach. So while the larger muscles of the chest, back and legs respond well to base of high load, low volume work, a similar approach for arms is somewhat less necessary and potentially unsafe.

Consider that the arm muscles are heavily involved in all major upper body compound movements. As such, exercises that better isolate the biceps or triceps are, by their very nature, going to provide less weight stress anyway.

For instance, barbell bench presses for the chest will massively load the triceps. If you were to do no additional triceps exercises while building up your bench press from 100kg to 200kg, you would find that your strength on direct triceps exercises would have almost doubled (at least a 50% gain) during that time also. So, while tricep work MIGHT assist your bench development, you COULD also argue that it is somewhat redundant in terms of tricep development.

Given that arm muscles will gain strength capacity in proportion to your strength gains on the major compound lifts, the best growth 'assistance' you can give them is to stretch the fascia to make room for new growth. And that means:
Pump 'em up, then stretch 'em hard

 

👉 Building Massive Biceps : Basic Training Principles
👉 Building Massive Biceps : Pro Observations
👉 Building Massive Biceps : Lessons from SEO's
👉 Building Massive Biceps : Arm Workout Structure
👉 Building Massive Biceps : Training Splits
👉 Building Massive Biceps : Exercise Selection
👉 Building Massive Biceps : Exploiting Exercises' Unique Attributes
👉 Building Massive Biceps : Rep Schemes
👉 Building Massive Biceps : A Word on Diet