Train Like an Athlete by ATHLEAN-X (Video Podcast)

In this video, I’m revealing the truth about the arm workout techniques and exercises I used to lay the foundation for building my biceps and triceps. I’m taking you all the way back to my early years of lifting to show you the two exercises I relied on and why I chose them as my arm size staples. By the time you are done watching you are going to have a lot of new tools in your arm building arsenal for getting bigger arms than you have right now regardless of how big they are at the moment.

First, I think it is important to stress that I was not the product of good muscle building or arm building genetics. My father certainly wasn’t Popeye and my mother at five feet tall was not lighting the world on fire with her massive biceps. Beyond that, I’ve never resorted to taking performance enhancing drugs to shortcut my way to my goals. In fact, little known fact for those that care to ever read my detailed descriptions (you know who you are), I have never even been drunk in my life! I live as clean a life as possible. Some would call it boring. I just always wanted to know that no matter what I achieved in my life (or didn’t) that it was all 100% the results of my own efforts. If I didn’t get to where I wanted, I’d have nobody to blame but myself.

With that groundwork laid, I did have an infatuation with wanting to build bigger arms when I was younger. Mostly this was because I had incredibly small arms. Everything I tried to build bigger biceps and triceps was not working. Ultimately, I developed a gameplan for building my arms that looking back, was rooted in some very sound principles of muscle growth without me even realizing it.

The first thing I did was limit my choices to one bicep exercise and one tricep exercise. Look, the elbow is a hinge joint with a very simple function of bending and straightening. The biceps take on the role of bending the elbow while the triceps act to straighten it. What was more important at the time that I was just starting out was to nail down just two exercises (one each for the biceps and triceps) and find ways that I could continue to stress my body with them.

The two arm exercises that I chose were the dumbbell biceps curl and the dumbbell lying triceps extension. I used dumbbells rather than barbells because that is all I had access to at the time. Later on in life I moved onto the barbell but that isn’t where I started. The key was that I didn’t just perform those two arm exercises the same way all the time. Instead, I varied the weights and the manner in which I did them to take advantage of all the different ways that I could build muscle.

The first arm building approach I took was using weights that I could train with in the 10 to 12 rep range and rely on progressive overload and increasing volume. I used to overdo the volume actually by randomly doing sets during commercial breaks as I kept the dumbbells near the television. I know, not a sophisticated approach but it is what I did.

Next, I would lighten the weight and shorten the range of motion into the top contracted position of the exercises. What I was unknowingly doing was creating an occlusion effect in my muscles that was metabolically stressing my biceps and triceps and helping them to grow. I learned how to accept the intense burn in my muscles as a good thing and it helped me to build bigger arms because of it.

Finally, my favorite technique was to increase the weights even more and use a bit of a cheat to get the heavy weights up (without completely bastardizing the form). From here, I focused on lowering the weight very slowly to accentuate the negative and