The Big Arms Project

The Big Arm Project

One area of the body that lads just seem obsessed about growing are the arms. This can just be seen as little more than laddish behavior or infantile male vanity but sleeve busting arms do get a lot of attention. And let’s face it no one who trains wants skinny little spaghetti arms, sure you can get a pair of them just sitting at home playing X-Box. And besides, in just about every survey carried out on the subject of what women find attractive in men the arms always score highly, second normally only to the abs. So arms are important.

I remember reading a story about the great, Charles Poliquin, who had been hired to   coach a national hockey team. The lads were dubious about been coached in strength and condition by a guy they had never heard off… Until he took his jacket off that was. Now, Poliquin, has a very impressive set of arms by absolutely anybody’s standards put having large arms does not a great coach make. Fortunately for the team they unknowingly had one of the great strength coaches of our time but they were initially sold just from the sight of his arms.

So Arm size can and does matter!

Now not everybody can grow a huge set of guns capable of sending you to the tailors every time you flex a bicep; there are some genetic limitations. But that does not mean you can’t grow an incredibly sculpted set of jar openers; you just need to get your training and diet right.

Now on the subject of diet i’m not going to go into a lot of detail in this article but let’s just get a couple of quick things out of the way, just so there is no confusion. If you are eating to win a, “Who wants to be the skinniest bastard in the room,” contest, then your arms are not going to grow. But it is not going to help much either if you are stuffing yourself with Ben and Jerrey’s on a “BULK UP” diet either. If you eat right to grow right then the training will take care of the rest. And if you don’t know how to eat right then sign up for one of our Dynamic Identity programs and we will teach you. Now back to those big arms.

Arm Training: What guys get wrong.

The biggest mistake guys make in the gym when it comes to growing their arms has got to be the famous arm day. A whole workout designed around pounding the biceps and triceps to pulp and then letting them recover for a week. Ha! For one thing, unless that session was the only one you are doing that week then recovery might be a bit of a problem, because, (and i am assuming here that if you are doing an arm day you are probably also doing a leg day, a chest and and a back day, or some combination of), every pulling exercise you do for your back is also going to working your poor hammered biceps and every pushing exercise you do for wither the chest or shoulders is only going to tax your already beaten triceps. So not much scope for recovery there.

Not to mention the fact that apart from throwing your arm muscles from the pan into the fire you are also compromising your main push and pull exercises  because with the arms out of the equation the chest, back and shoulders wont be able to move as much weight as they normally would.

Now it is not that you should never do arm day routines it is just that they should only ever last about 3 to 4 weeks max and i wold not recommend doing them more than maybe twice a year. You have to understand that the whole arm day programs came from the world of steroid body building, (in fact the whole idea of body specific days come from the world of steroid training but more on that in other articles) and steroided athletes recover fast, real fast; that is the whole point of the steroids. So that is why they can do arm days every week if they like. If you are a natural trainer though… you can’t. You need to allow your arms to maintain enough structure and function to get the best out of your push and pull exercises while at the same time stimulate them enough to grow.

How to get them pipes growing. 

One of the advantages of the arm muscles is the fact that they are small. This is often seen as a training disadvantage but only if you are trying to train them like the larger muscles in the body such a the pecs, lats or quads. The thing about small muscles is that then need to be trained like small muscles and not big ones, and this goes for the upper traps and calves as well as the muscles of the arm. They need to be trained to their strengths. And their greatest strength is that they they heal quickly and this means they can be trained often. Now at first this might seem like a contradiction to what i was saying earlier but it’s not because i am not talking about hammering them into submission several times a week. Little muscles don’t respond to being trashed to often, they just end up injured and weak. The trick to arm growth is to train the arms often but not hard. Vary the reps and exercise as much as possible but keep the day to day sets low.

The program i am showing you below should be slotted in with you normal training. Just get your big exercises out of the way first. So if you are doing squats then get them done before you do your arms, and likewise for the dead-lift, bench press, over head press or pull-ups. Then once your big lifts are done turn your attention to your arms.

This program requires you train your arms 4 times per week and should be done for 6 weeks. On a day to day bases it might seem easy but don’t add more sets or exercises. The program works because it balances work and recovery in the way best suited to arm growth. It does this by allowing for a lot of volume spread out over the week without ever trashing the arms in the process.

The Big Arm Project Program.

Clicking on any of the exercise names below will take you to the page in our exercise library where a video of the exercise can be found.

Day 1

 Day 2

Day 3

 Day 4

Dynamic Identity programs.

Here at Dynamic Identity we love giving away great programs like “The Big Arms Project” and i hope i hope you really enjoy it. When you are ready to take it to the next level you should join us here at Dynamic identity by signing up for one of our amazing Transformation programs.

Coach Aaron Hanlon

Wishing you a very Dynamic future.