How to Get Bigger Arms - Part 1

“Big gun, got a number one

Big gun, loaded and cocked

Big gun, hot hot hot

Got big gun, ready or not”

As AC/DC sing, men have always been proud to show off their BIG GUNS. How to Get Bigger Arms is one of the most common questions at the gym. You’ve heard it and chances are you’ve even said it when inspecting your arms in the locker-room mirror.

If you wish to get bigger arms and a functional, harmonic body I suggest you first focus your attention on three things: Breathing, Body Control, and Dedication. We’ll get deeply into these later, for now let’s see what are arm muscles functions and how to train them best.

The arm is a very complex set of bones, joints, muscles, tendons and ligaments which compose a solid, powerful and extremely mobile structure. This versatile system is made of three junctions with the relative set of ligaments, tendons and muscles: Wrist, Elbow, Shoulder (WES). The wrists, elbows and shoulders take part in most of our everyday actions.

When you figure a big guy with big guns, what’s your first thought? Mobility? Versatility?

I don’t want to teach a lesson in body mechanics; I’m just trying to confute a little bit the “big guns” party.

The best thing our arms can do is allow us a very wide range of motion uniting shoulder movements with elbow rotations and wrist flexion, if we limit this mobility by increasing too much the muscle mass and don’t compensate this growth with a good agility training, we end up with a limited range of motion in a part of the body which is used for EVERY task other than scaring the little guys at the gym.

Anyway, I’m not a big fan of big arms, so let’s get back to Breathing, Body Control, and Dedication or the “Three Golden Rules” of training and to some real exercises to practice for bigger, but also useful arms:

The Three Golden Rules in A Few Words:

1. Breathing

Breathing is vital, apart that, you need it to perform at the peak level and on top of that, I told you to do so, so just do it! When you’re training arms, you won’t feel the same fatigue in the whole body as when you train other body parts. Arm muscles are much smaller compared to back or legs muscles, BUT if you really want maximum results you have to keep on breathing with a good pattern to supply enough oxygen throughout all reps.

REMEMBER THAT: GOOD BREATHING = MORE GOOD FORM REPS

2. Body Control

You often see people trying to impress others by loading the bar and swinging the weight, cheating the whole way and stimulating every muscle BUT the arm muscles they are trying to work. This is actually NO USE if you want to get bigger arms and may bring a lot of injuries. If you use your quads, torso, shoulders, and biceps to go against gravity and push that weight up, ALL of the muscles involved are actually sharing this weight. Weren’t you working on you arms, only?

Pull off a couple of plates and do it the right way! It doesn’t matter if people laugh at you, they’ll stop laughing in a couple of months when you’ll rip your sleeve with a rocky mountain! You should ALWAYS feel your body; this allows you to prevent injuries AND grow faster.

3. Dedication

Needless to say, if you don’t plan things right, or there’s a hole in your yearly dedication, you’ll get some results, miss some of those results in no time, and if you’re lucky you end up even.

Plan your training; think ahead, it’s October? Think “it’s Christmas”, is it Christmas think “summer’s here!” if you sit on your gains, you’ll never fix them, and you’re surely going to lose them.

We’ll get into the best exercises known to be effective on the arms in the next part of the article, our biceps and triceps will be put under test.

For now think about these rules and apply them. I will tell you how to get bigger arms. And please don’t try to… DO IT!

If you’re ready to put your biceps and triceps under test and get bigger arms, click here for the next part of the article.