What Gives Arms Their Size?

Well from my experience very few people realize that the majority of your arm size is determined by how big your triceps are. Although biceps are the staple of good looking arms, triceps are what help give your arms an overall bigger appearance. You can think of your arm size like this 2/3 triceps + 1/3 biceps. Now of course if you want bigger biceps you aren’t going to work your triceps alone. But we don’t want just massive biceps we want massive arms. Our focus will be triceps, biceps, and forearms.

Triceps Lets Get Them Huge

Triceps are the rear facing muscles on your arm, they are responsible for pushing things down or whenever your arm extends from a bent position. The key to building big triceps is heavy weights! There are a ton of good tricep workouts and like I said earlier the key is variation. I tend to do chest with triceps one day, and back with biceps another day. Now that is some variation but we need to vary the workouts we do on those days as well. If you keep going back to the gym and doing the same exercises sure you will become stronger, but you won’t necessarily gain much more size since your focusing on certain muscle groups. Of course if you have a decent routine where you hit different muscle groups in one workout, you are already using variation in a different way, which is also effective.

Tricep workouts:

• Tricep Push Downs – Usually we perform this workout with the cable machines, setting the cable to the highest position, slapping a V handle on the cable and pushing down. This is an excellent workout for your triceps.
• Skull-Crushers – The coolest sounding workout in my opinion. This workout can be performed with either dumbbells or barbells or curl bars. The same basic idea applies to all ways of doing this workout so I will just explain how to do the workout on a curl bar. The EZ curl bars are awesome for this workout since you can angle your hands instead of keeping them lateral. So we will need a bench, a bar, and some weights. The bench should be flat. For beginners you can by sitting on the bench with your bar sitting on the ground in front of you, you then lift the bar up and slowly lower yourself down so you are laying on the bench. Now the one thing you need to remember is to not crush your skull…know your own tolerance and use a spotter. To perform the workout you just need to keep your arms from your shoulders to your elbows straight up in the air perpendicular to the ground. Now you only bend at your elbow and lower your arms and the bar to your head, stopping before you hit your head. Then your raise the bar back up by bending only at the elbow. You want to try to keep your elbows tucked in and stop them from swinging outward. You will feel this on triceps, especially if you have never done this exercise before.
• Dips – This is a great tricep workout that you can before almost anywhere, some gyms have pull up bars with handles for doing dips. To do a dip you need something to hold yourself in the air with, using your arms, while they are straight and by your side. The dip machine works the best, especially since most of them have weight assistors that allow you to make yourself lighter. For this workout you once again bend at the elbow, and keep your forearms as straight as possible, you lower yourself down so that your arms are parallel with the floor and then raise yourself back up.
• Over Head Dumbbell Tricep Extension – This is a great workout that helps hit your triceps at a new angle. To do this workout, you need a flat bench to sit on, or you can stand. Get a single dumbbell (you can do this workout with one arm at a time or both, I prefer both) now you grab one of the weight-sides of the dumbbell right where the grip connects and lift the dumbbell over your head.  Create a diamond with your hands around the weight where the grip connects to the weight, the grip should be in the center of your diamond. Now you lower the weight behind your head, be careful not to hit yourself in the head, and then you extend your arms again above your head.

Building the Biceps

Biceps are generally considered the staple of a muscular physique. The bicep can develop a very nice peak that when flexed will bring shirts to their knees. To build this massive peak you need to be able to hit your biceps with workouts from all different angles. There are many very common bicep workouts which I will not cover, they include standard curls, hammer curls, preacher curls. Now for the new workout ideas:

• Arnold Curls – This is a great workout, just be mindful that you will not be able to lift as much weight as you can with a standard curl. To do this I generally use a flat bench to sit on with my legs out in front of me, spread apart. Now you need a dumbbell and you need to lean forward so that your elbow is resting on the inside of your thigh, one arm at a time. With your arm fully extended but slightly off the ground, you slowly (slow is key to hit deep muscle tissue) raise your arm all the way into a full bicep flex. Then slowly lower your arm back down. This workout feels great and really hits deep bicep muscles.
• 21′s – This is an old favorite of mine. To do 21′s you can really use any kind of weight you want but I tend to go for the curl bar on the cable machine. So with the cable all the way down to the lowest position your grab the curl bar and lift the bar from fully extended to half way up 7 times. On the last lift you stay at half way and lift all the way up, once you are all the way up you lower back down to halfway, and go back up 7 times. On the last lowering you lower the bar all the way down to full extension and then begin 7 reps of a full curls. The name 21 comes from the fact that you are actually doing 7 reps over 3 sets (7*3=21).
• Reverse Barbell Curls – From my forearm guide - Most people are familiar with barbell curls, this is essentially a whole new spin on that technique. To begin we start out with our palms facing down and grabbing the bar with an overhand shoulder width grip. Now you perform the curl essentially the same way, you start from the lower position and raise the bar up until your forearms are vertical, now you lower your arms back down extending your arms and allowing the muscle to relax momentarily.

Forearm Building

I have already written a very detailed forearm workout guide which will help build massive arms, so check that article out here.

Keep Up the Hard Work

Now that we have some new exercises to try you can vary them into your typical workout and help hit your muscles from all angles. These workouts will help to increase bicep peak, tricep size and forearm size. Helping to give you ripped and defined arms that demand respect.

If you have any comments or suggestions feel free to comment!