Adventures in Muscle-Building, Part One: Arms

The Art of Building Big, Muscular, Powerful Arms

     Where exactly this new series will go, I’m not entirely sure.  I want to discuss and analyze the myriad of workout routines, training techniques, tips, and various pointers that I’ve learned over the years—training both myself and others—for gaining muscle and building strength.  For no reason other than it’s what’s currently on my mind, I thought I’d start with arm training.  No matter who they are, where they’re training, or what their ultimate goals are, every man wants big arms.  I realize that this isn’t so much the case for many female lifters—men tend to think of chest, arms, and abs when it comes to aesthetic goals, whereas women think primarily in terms of leg and glutes—though even they want to prevent sagging triceps for a visually pleasing body.  And let’s admit it, there is something quite beautiful—for me, so I figure it’s got to be that way for some other men reading this—about a woman with strong, powerful arms, the kind of gal that looks impressive when she hits a “front double biceps” pose.  So, with some of those thoughts rambling around in my head like a whirling pinball on a pinball machine, I thought why not just start with arms.  Let’s see where this heads…

     I have never had fantastic arm development, though I eventually did develop “good” arms.  A lot of lifters are “limbs” bodybuilders, and don’t have that problem.  They have no issue developing their shoulders, arms, and even their legs and calves, but struggle more with chest and back.  Others, like me, are “torso” lifters.  I never had an issue building a big chest, back, and glutes, even legs, particularly my upper thighs.  But I always struggled with arms and calves.  Part of that has to do with how long my arms are.  Standing upright, I can, without bending over at all, touch my fingers to the top of my knees.  It made pulling big deadlifts pretty easy, but big, full arms with rounded biceps and thick, muscular, and shapely triceps, not so much.  Here’s the thing, though.  You need to listen to the lifters who built well-developed muscles that they always struggled the most with.  Because of my genetic limits, it took a lot of different methods and workouts to build my arms.  I learned a lot.  Now, I’ll do my best to pass that knowledge on to you, or some of it. I'd need to write an arm training book for the whole muscle-building shebang.

     If you’re new to training, don’t worry so much about direct arm training.  Also, I realize that if that describes you, well, you might not listen to my advice.  When I was 13 or 14, and my father for my birthday bought me one of those old DP barbell sets from Sears and Roebuck—gray, plastic weights filled with cement—I did a lot of workouts consisting of little other than barbell curls.  My arms didn’t see any results, however, until I started doing some hard and heavy chest, back, and, yep, leg training.  As Tom Platz told me when I met him back in ‘95—I think it was ‘95—if you want big arms, then you need to do some heavy, high-rep squat workouts.  By the way, that was his answer to growing any bodypart.  Want big biceps?  Squat.  Want a big, massive chest?  Squat.  Want a wide, thick back?  Squat.  Okay, you get the point.  Hopefully.

     Beginners should start with a full-body workout, done 3 days per week, consisting of squats, bench presses, power cleans, overhead presses, chins, and barbell curls.  Trust me, your arms will grow plenty from that.  You maybe could add in a direct triceps movement such as close-grip dips or skull crushers, but you might not even need that.  The tris will get plenty of work from the bench presses and overhead work.  The cleans and chins will work your biceps enough that, perhaps, you might not even need the barbell curls.

     Bill Starr thought the best biceps movement on the planet was close-grip, underhand chins.  For most lifters, I think he’s correct.  If you struggle to build arms like yours truly, then just add barbell curls and you’ll be in good shape.

     If you insist on doing direct arm work for both your bis and tris, don’t do much.  Most likely, you don’t need anything more than this:

Barbell curls: 3x5-7

Skull crushers: 3x8-10

     Triceps tend to respond better to slightly higher reps, but that might not be the case.  You need to experiment to find what works for you, but that workout is a pretty good starting point.  Do it 2 to 3 days per week.  If you do a full-body workout on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, do the direct arm work on Mondays and Fridays.  A week of training might look something like this:

Monday:

Squats: 5x5

Bench presses: 5x5

Military presses: 5x5

Power cleans: 5x3-5

Weighted chins: 3x5

Barbell curls: 3x5-7

Skull crushers: 3x8-10

Wednesday:

Squats: 3x5

Bench presses: 3x5

One-arm dumbbell overhead presses: 3x5

Weighted chins: 3x5

(Maybe even drop the bench presses.)

Friday:

Squats: 5x5

Bench presses: 5x5

Military presses: 5x5

Power cleans: 5x3-5

Weighted chins: 3x5

Barbell curls: 3x5-7

Skull crushers: 3x8-10

     If you struggle to gain muscle or weight in general, make sure you’re eating enough calories, too.  Greg Zulak used to insist that, for the natural bodybuilder, you needed to gain 10 pounds for every inch that you added to your arms.

     Maybe you’ve read—or watched videos on YouTube or whatnot—workouts of advanced or professional bodybuilders, or, heck, influencers, where they did a bunch of sets and a bunch of exercises for their arms, biceps and triceps both, and so you think you need the same in order to build muscles like them.  But you might be surprised to know that a lot of pro bodybuilders built their arms by doing relatively little work.

     When I worked for various bodybuilding magazines in the 1990s and the early part of this century, I talked to a lot of editors and writers who actually witnessed the workouts of a lot of pro bodybuilders, the guys that wrote their training articles.  When you read an article “written” by a pro bodybuilder, with very few exceptions, they weren’t actually written by them.  A writer for a magazine would watch a bodybuilder train and then ghost-write an article with that bodybuilder’s name as the author of it in the magazine.  Eventually, I became good friends with Jeff Everson—may his memory be eternal—when I worked for Planet Muscle magazine.  He would call me up in the evening some days, and we would talk for an hour or more about different training subjects.  Before starting his own magazine, he was the long-time editor-in-chief for Muscle & Fitness magazine.  He didn’t just watch a lot of professional bodybuilders train, he trained quite a few of them, including his ex-wife, the multiple Ms. Olympia Cory Everson.  What I learned from all of that is this: A lot of times, the workouts written in the magazines were complete, utter, and total BS.  Sometimes, the writer just made up the entire workout, and the bodybuilder didn’t do anything, or very little, that was in the training article in real life.

     An example that really stuck with me was Phil Hernon.  Hernon is little-known these days.  In the ‘90s, most bodybuilders knew him, if they knew anything about him at all, from his mug gracing the cover of the “Serious Growth” training manuals written by Leo Costa Jr., the most popular of which was “Serious Growth 3: Big Beyond Belief.”  If you want to know a little more about Hernon and BBB, then read my article Big Beyond Belief, HIT, Phil Hernon, and Other Things from the ‘90s.  I wrote it 12 years ago, and it’s still one of my most popular posts for some reason that I can’t quite fathom.  Anyway, I was talking to an editor of one of the major bodybuilding rags one time, and he told me that they completely made up a triceps training article on Hernon.  Why?  Because the only thing that Hernon was doing for his triceps, at least at the time, was a couple sets of dips.  They didn’t think a triceps article on Hernon that consisted of 2 sets of dips would sell much, so they just made up a completely different workout.

     Hernon wasn’t an exception.  He was more the rule than you might realize.  Crazy but true.  As a young man who devoured the muscle magazines every month that they hit the newsstands in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, this revelation really made me think more about training.

     Now, none of this is to write that the training programs and workout routines that were published in all of those muscle mags back then were wrong.  They were largely indicative of the kind of training that most professional bodybuilders did.  Lots of volume with plenty of sets and reps—basically anything that resulted in a massive pump in whatever muscles were being trained.  Unless it was Mike Mentzer or a bodybuilder that followed his methods.  They were the minority, but there were guys that did ultra-hard, ultra-heavy workouts that were basic and brief but quite “intense.”

     A lot of the bodybuilders in the silver and golden eras of bodybuilding yore did a bunch of one-exercise-per-bodypart workouts, especially for the arms.  Sergio Oliva and Serge Nubret, for example, often just did one exercise for each muscle group and did it for however many sets it took for a massive pump.  It might have been 8.  It might have been 20.  They just “bombed and blitzed” away until that pump was achieved.  It was a common training method.  The magazines, to fill out the pages of their rags, often wrote workout routines where the bodybuilders did 4 to 5 exercises for each muscle, even if they typically did just 1 movement.  Because the truth is that many of those bodybuilders also did multi-exercise workouts.  But the routines printed were just one of the workouts that they utilized.

     I love one-movement-per-muscle routines.  I think they are great for arm training.  You can’t go wrong with a biceps workout consisting of nothing but barbell curls.  Here are some example workouts you might try for the barbell curl:

10x10

8x8

10x3

8x5

8x8,8,6,6,4,4,2,2

5x5, 5x10

15x3

20x1 (yep, 20 singles)

3 triple drop sets of 10 reps on each “drop” for a total of 12 sets

     You can do the same workouts for a triceps movement, as well, though you should be careful with really heavy, low-rep sets on an exercise such as skull crushers just to limit elbow pain.  If you don’t have an issue with your elbows, then go ahead and do it.  Otherwise, stick with the higher rep stuff.

     I think my arms grew for the first time in my life when I used some of the workouts that Gene Mozee wrote about in a ‘92 article for Ironman magazine entitled “Mini-Max Arm Blasts.”  I’ve written about this workout before, but it worked so well for me that I think it deserves mention here.  Mozee was one of the few authors who not only wrote the actual workouts of various pros, but he also built a phenomenal physique in his own right, not to mention the fact that he was incredibly strong.  In his MM arm-blast article, he wrote about 3 different workout routines that he said brought about the most arm growth for both him and a number of bodybuilders that he trained.  Here are the 3 workouts along with some of the exact words from Mozee in the article:

Program 1: Descending Sets

     "This program was given to me by Dan Pace, a bodybuilder/powerlifter and gym owner who used it to produce new arm growth on pupils who had hit a wall," Mozee said.  "This program allowed his students to pump up their arms larger than they ever had before."

     The program works similar to other descending sets programs that you have probably used before, with a couple of caveats.  One, you are going to superset a biceps and a tricep exercise, and two, you are going to do each descending set for 3 sets of 7 reps, for a total of 21 reps on each exercise.  (Classic bodybuilders from the '70s and before seem to like "21 reps" for some reason.)

     Use dumbbells for the workout, simply because it's easy to move from one dumbbell to another without having to "strip weight" on a barbell.  Mozee recommended lying triceps extensions supersetted with incline dumbbell curls.

     Begin the program by doing lying dumbbell extensions and by selecting 3 pairs of dumbbells that you can do 7 reps with, say 30s, 25s, and 20s.  Do 7 reps with the 30s, immediately followed by 7 reps with the 25s, and then 7 with the 20s.  As soon as you finish the last set of 7 move immediately to a descending set of incline dumbbell curls using the same method.

     Perform 3 more "cycles" of supersets to finish the workout.

Program 2: 10 Blast Supersets

     "This procedure has many variations because you pick your favorite biceps and triceps exercises and blast out 10 sets of each in superset fashion without resting," says Mozee.  "As with all exercises in this article, you must use strict form and work as hard as possible.  Complete the 10 supersets as fast as possible—no resting until you finish the routine."

     In the article, here are the 2 routines that Mozee recommended:

Seated dumbbell curls: 10x8-10

Lying barbell triceps extensions: 10x8-10

or

Lying lat machine curls: 10x8-10

Standing pushdowns: 10x8-10

Program 3: Power-Mass Supersets

     This is the hardest of the 3 programs in the article.  Below are Mozee's words verbatim:

     "This is a very rugged routine that produces both size and strength at the same time.  It works best for the advanced bodybuilder.  The exercises are preacher bench curls and parallel bar dips.

     "Begin with preacher curls with a weight that you can handle for 8 to 10 reps.   Without resting, hustle to the dip bars and do 8 to 10 reps with weight, carefully concentrating all the force of the exercise on your triceps.  Perform 3 sets of each exercise as fast as you can in superset fashion.  Add more weight for the 4th and 5th supersets and do 5 to 7 reps.  Add still more weight and do 2 sets of 3 to 5 reps.  On the final superset, drop the poundage and blast out 15 to 20 reps on the curls, and do as many reps as you can on the dips without weight.  Your arms will be blown up beyond recognition."

     If you choose to do these workouts exactly as written, twice per week is as frequent as you would want to go.  You might also follow a 3-on, 1-off or a 4-on, 1-off split.  You might do a 3-way split of chest and back on day 1, shoulders and arms on day 2, and legs on day 3.  Or, to really focus on arm training, a 4-way split of chest and shoulders/back/legs/and arms.  If you go with a 3-way split, and need a little more recovery on occasion, then you can follow a 3-on, 1-off followed by a 3-on, 2-off schedule or you can just follow a 2-on, 1-off, 1-on, 1-off schedule.

     In the mid ‘90s, Steve Holman, the editor of Ironman, created a program that he called “positions-of-flexion” or “POF” for short.  Based on the observation of how Arnold trained his biceps—the multiple Mr. O, movie star, and future governor often used a biceps workout consisting of standing dumbbell curls, incline dumbbell curls, and concentration curls—Holman thought it best to do a workout that consisted of a compound lift (DB curls), a stretch movement (incline DB curls), and a contraction exercise (concentration curls).  He reckoned that, by doing so, you “hit” the muscle fibers in a unique, but complete, way.  All of the muscle fibers are contracted to the “max” in such a workout.  For triceps, by the way, you would use something such as close-grip dips (compound), skull crushers/pullovers (stretch), and dumbbell kickbacks (contraction).  Unlike Schwarzenegger, Holman was a proponent of a more “HIT-style” of training.  He wasn’t an “outright” follower of Heavy Duty or Arthur Jones’s HIT training, but he was deeply influenced by the “hard but brief-and-basic” approach.  Kind of a Hit prodigal son, if you will, but one who never came all the way back home.  I agree, by the way, that more advanced bodybuilders should consider hitting all of the “positions-of-flexion” lifts, but I would do them with a volume closer to what Arnie and the other golden era legends utilized.  A good arm workout that uses the different “positions” but also utilizes varying set/rep ranges might look something like this:

Barbell curls: 5x3-5

Incline dumbbell curls: 4x6-8 (each arm)

Concentration curls: 3x10-12 (each arm)

Close-grip, thick-bar bench presses: 5x3-5

Overhead rope extensions: 4x6-8 (stand facing away from the lower rope pulley, getting a deep stretch at the bottom of the movement)

Dumbbell kickbacks: 3x10-12 (each arm)

     Follow a similar schedule as what I recommended above for Mozee’s mini-max arm blast workouts.

     Some lifters might follow all of the workout suggestions so far and still not gain much, if any, arm growth.  They go the Hernon route and do a very limited number of lifts, doing nothing but a couple sets of chins and barbell curls, or they go the golden era way with voluminous workouts but still no gains.  They label themselves “hardgainers” at this point and lament that nothing works.  Not so fast.  Hold your horses, I say.  The answer might be that you need some HFT with an “easy strength” or “easy muscle” routine.  With these programs, you do short and “easy” workout sessions, but you repeat them often, and I mean often, as in every day of the week (or close).  For instance, you might do barbell curls for 2 sets of 5 reps, 3 sets of 3 reps, or 5 sets of 2 reps (easy strength) or even just 1 set of 10-20 reps (easy muscle) 5 to 6 days a week.  Along with the curls, keep in mind that you’ll also (or should be) doing the same thing on some kind of squat, press, lower body pull, and upper body pull at each session.

     If you go the HFT, easy strength route, the goal is to limit your total reps per workout per lift to 10, but the sets/reps can vary at each session.  A week of workouts might look like this for your biceps:

Monday: barbell curls - 2 sets of 5 reps

Tuesday: standing dumbbell curls - 3 sets of 3 reps (each arm)

Wednesday: cable curls - 1 set of 10 reps

Friday: barbell curls - 5 progressively heavier sets of 2 reps

Saturday: standing dumbbell curls: 2 sets of 5 reps

     If you want to experiment with both high-frequency and high-volume or high-frequency and high-intensity, you can also try a “Russian” (HF/HV) or a “Bulgarian” (HF/HI) style workout.  Biceps are unique in a way—which I’ll explain momentarily—so they may or may not respond that well to this kind of lifting.  If, however, you’ve tried either kind of workout for, say, squats and got great results, it’d be worth a try.  The “issue” is this: The muscles that typically respond well to either Russian or Bulgarian methods are “phasic” muscles.  Phasic muscles are, to keep it simple, the “power” muscles you would use to “explode” if you do something such as sprints or, say, push presses.  Phasic muscles respond well to HFT of the Russian or Bulgarian mold because those systems were originally designed for weightlifters.  Squats, overhead presses, and the quick lifts—all used for the two (and at one time three) competitive weightlifting movements—all utilize phasic muscles.  At one point Russian and other former Eastern-bloc strength coaches started using the methods for powerlifting, as well.  And therein lies one problem.  The squat is a phasic lift.  The bench press is kind of a phasic lift, in that it uses the shoulders and triceps, though it also involves a deep stretch of the pecs, and the pecs are kind of in between phasic and “tonic.”  The deadlift, however, is a “tonic” lift.  Tonic muscles, to keep it simple again, are the muscles that you use if you’re hanging from a bar or a tree limb.  Lats, hamstrings, and biceps are tonic muscles, in other words.  This is the reason the deadlift doesn’t always respond well to HFT.  But for some lifters it does.

     Which brings us around to the biceps and HF and either HV or HI training.  Like the deadlift, arm exercises such as barbell curls, close-grip chins, or dumbbell curls (or whatever) may or may not respond well to Russian and/or Bulgarian training.  Unlike the deadlift, however, there’s another factor at play.  The biceps are a small muscle group.  Even if you have 18-inch arms, your arms are still smaller than your other muscles.  (Or should be.)  In the West, the general consensus has been that arms, because they are smaller, require less work.  In East Europe, however, bodybuilders believe that arms require more work, not less, because of the same reason, that they are smaller.  The thinking goes that the smaller the muscle, the easier and quicker it recovers.  After all, 10x10 on cable curls doesn’t “smoke you” the way a 10x10 squat or, God forbid, a deadlift workout will.  So, perhaps the arms can handle either Russian or Bulgarian styles of training.

     Don’t just jump in to either of the workout suggestions that follow.  You should only attempt these once you’re at the very least at the “intermediate” level.  An advanced lifter should know his body well enough that he knows whether or not these workouts will work for him.

     The Bulgarian way to big biceps goes like this—it’s simple but definitely intense: At every workout, work up to a max triple, double, or single on barbell curls.  My advice is to do ramps.  Start by doing progressively heavier sets of 5 reps.  Slowly, work your way up to a near max of 5 reps.  Once you reach a heavy, but not entirely all-out, set of 5 reps, start doing triples.  Again, work up to a near max triple.  (You might want to stop with triples when first starting out.)  Then switch over to doubles, working up to a near max set of 2 reps.  Now, switch over to singles and work up to a near max single.  Here’s the kicker: repeat daily!  At least, that’s what the Bulgarians would do.  Train the barbell curl in this manner 5 to 6 days per week.  Honestly, I also think it would work by just training it in this manner 3 days weekly, but, hey, that ain’t the Bulgarian way!  The key is to not worry if your max weight waxes and wanes, because it will.  But, slowly, over the course of 8 to 12 weeks of training, you’ll reach the point where even your “lighter” workouts are heavier than your “heavy” sessions when you first started.  For more on the Bulgarian method—it’ll give you some more tips that you can then apply to arm training—check out my article The Bulgarian Way.

     For Russian training, you could try something such as the “Smolov plan” but use it on curls instead of squats.  Your workout on barbell curls would look like this:

Monday: 4 sets of 9 reps using 70% of your 1-rep max

Wednesday: 5 sets of 7 reps @ 75%

Friday: 7 sets of 5 reps @ 80%

Saturday: 10 sets of 3 reps @ 85%

     On each subsequent week, add 5 pounds to the barbell curl at each workout.  Stick with it for 4 to 6 weeks.  I doubt you’d be able to still add weight after 6 weeks, but I suppose you could try.  8 weeks, however, would be about the limit to how long you could keep that up, and it would be quite a Herculean effort to do it.  It also helps if you have a “break-in” period for a couple of weeks before you start the routine outright.  I wouldn’t just jump right into this if you’ve been following any kind of low-frequency program, even if it was one that had a lot of volume and/or intensity.  If you’ve already been utilizing some kind of HFT program, however, you might not need the break-in period.

     Okay, I suppose this particular muscle-building adventure has gone on long enough.  Adventures, however wondrous they are, have to come to an end at some point, after all.  Hopefully, however, this has given you some new ideas for arm training or perhaps given you some training inspiration to get those guns growing, whether it's again or for the first time.

     I’m not sure what our next adventure will be or where it will take us, whether it’s an adventure in chest training, squatting, or perhaps even one we can take for the quick lifts or one through the history of strength.  Until then, your next adventure is waiting for you in the gym.  Put on your (figurative) fedora and get at it, though I do wonder if Indy would have kept his on while lifting.

     As always, got comments or questions? Leave them in the “comments” section below or shoot me an email for a more private correspondence.  I typically get around to answering my emails every couple days or so.

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