 Our number one, maybe correct me if I'm wrong, Adam, is our number one downloaded free guide, how to get big arms. I think that's one of our top ones, right? It's a top one, it's not the number one. Number one is butt, dude. Everybody wants a butt. Yeah. Everybody wants to have to compete. I think he goes butt, abs, arms. That's what he goes. Okay. So, yeah, that's what everybody... Build your perfect man. Yeah. Butt, abs, arms. But it's definitely a popular one. It's one I get comments on all the time. Well, I think... I just got one, in fact, yesterday. I also find that it attracts both sexes. Sometimes you think... The title, I think, is not ideal, right? Because big arms does seem like it appeals to the male audience, for the most part. But when I think back to training clients, I got equally as many women that were asking about building their arms. They just don't use... They don't use words like, Adam, I want to get big arms. I want to tone and define my arms. Exactly. I want Michelle Obama arms. You get statements like that, but they're wanting to... Which essentially build their arms. So, like, you wouldn't use the term big. So... But when you look actually at the analytics of the guide, it's a pretty even split of both male and female that are downloading and reading. That's who I got the message from. It was a female listener, and she said she downloaded the Big Arms Guide and had been using it. It's like, I wish I knew this before. Now my arms are finally responding, because I think, especially, workouts directed towards women, they tend to take certain effective elements out. But it could be frustrating for men, too. When you are working out, one of the main areas, I think, when you're saying is developing your arms, and if they're not, insert whatever word. Building, sculpting, shaping, toning. By the way, there's all those words mean building. Same thing. All of those words mean building. If you build the muscles of your arms, they tone, they shape, they sculpt. If you build them a lot, they get bigger. All those things mean building, but it can be very frustrating for a lot of people, because they follow popular workout advice, train their arms, and they make a lot of mistakes, and so it becomes a stubborn body part. It's like, my arms aren't really responding the way I want to, so I thought, why don't we create a whole topic episode on just the arms, and cover the most important things you could do to get the arms to finally respond. When I first started working out, this was definitely a focus of mine, was training my biceps and triceps, and getting there to look at, and I definitely made a lot of mistakes, I think, with my training early on. Well, I think it's really easy for bigger muscles to take over movements. When you do exercises that are for small muscle groups, the bicep and tricep would be considered small, relatively small in comparison to some of your bigger muscles, like your back, and your legs, and your chest, and so these smaller muscles are actually sometimes harder to target, because the body doesn't think this way, like if you perform a movement or an exercise, the body wants to do it with as little effort as possible, which means it would ideally recruit these bigger muscles to help the movement out, and so if you don't go into exercising knowing that, that, hey, I'm just going to perform this curl, or perform this push down, not knowing that the body will naturally want to cheat the exercise, and by cheat, I mean get help and recruit the bigger muscles to actually take it over, and this is what I, in my experience, what I found most common when I was addressing this with both male and female, when they struggle with building, sculpting, shaping whatever term you want to use, the arms, many times it's, you know, one of the four things that I know that we're going to cover in today's topic, and one of the main ones that I would see is that, you know, they were allowing the bigger muscle groups to take over the movement. Yeah, I mean it is a bit of a skill to be able to really concentrate on a specific area of your body, be able to put your body in the right position to make that effective, and I'd struggle with that a bit, too, with clients where just immediately they would have these sort of hardwired patterns of being able to move the weight, and I'd have to check them and, you know, try to get them to remain in good, tight posture and be able to hold and sustain that while they're moving the weight. That's like a foreign concept to a lot of people when, you know, what they've done before that was just I need to move this weight from here up to here, and really not considering, you know, what needs to transpire and where I need to feel that specifically. Yeah, and there's also a misconception around exercises and angles and, you know, a misunderstanding of the muscles of the arm to begin with. Like, for example, the bicep, you know, when we flex our bicep, what you're looking at is the bicep, you're looking at the brachialis, which is a muscle underneath. The bicep has two heads. Each head works a little bit differently with different exercises. The brachialis works a little bit differently with different exercises. You can train all of them and sometimes place more focus on some parts and less focus on other parts. The other thing to consider is, with angles of exercises is, where's the tension highest in a particular exercise? Is it in the squeeze or the stretch or the mid-range? Training each of those gives you more full and balanced development. The triceps has three heads to it. One of the heads is way more active at some angles than other angles. So you might be changing your hand position with your tricep exercises, but not changing necessarily the right angle to affect different parts of the tricep. And so you might end up with underdeveloped triceps or unbalanced triceps. I mentioned the brachialis. Almost nobody considers a brachialis when training their biceps. That's a muscle under the bicep. And if you develop it, it pushes the bicep out. Then you have the forearms, the flexors and extenders, which a lot of people also completely neglect. And sometimes weak forearms and weak hands can get in the way of developing nice-looking arms. Well, you just mentioned one of our four points that we're going to talk about. And I'm glad that you listed it first because this was the biggest one for me. So forever, as a young kid going to the gym, and I'm sure you guys were just like this, right? A new machine in the gym, like you've never tried out. You want to try all the machines out. All the cable tools, the triangle, the straight bar, the easy curl bar, the rope, like you want to try all these things out. What I didn't understand the importance of the position of the elbow in relation to how it works the tricep and how it works the bicep and how important that was to stimulate more growth, right? And so I found myself doing what I thought were different really exercises, but my bicep didn't recognize it as really different. So what I mean by that is if you stand in front of a cable, and you do a basic tricep pushdown, most people know what that looks like, right? So hopefully you can visualize standing in front of a cable and you're doing a tricep pushdown. You doing that with a straight bar, a triangle, a reverse grip, a rope, and all those things is the same movement. And the tricep recognizes that way. So even though I thought I was being smart and changing it up every other week or every few weeks by changing the tool that I was holding, my tricep had already become very adapted to that movement and I have already saw most the gains I was gonna get from that and I wasn't varying the angle. You were changing the wrong things. So hand position, whether my hand is turned up or neutral or turned down affects the bicep. It does not affect the tricep. So the bicep is involved in turning the hand. So if you flex your bicep and look in the mirror right now and then turn your hand out or in, you'll see your bicep dance a little bit. It moves a little bit. And that's because the bicep, the way it attaches is it also rotates the hand a bit. So doing curls with my palms up versus doing curls with my hands facing each other versus doing curls with my hands facing down, it does train the bicep differently. That matters. Doesn't matter for triceps. Rotating my hands for triceps makes pretty much no difference. Unless it changes the angle of the elbow, it's not making any difference at all. Understanding this is really, really important. There's another part that's important to understand which is where is this exercise most difficult in the range of motion? Is it at the top? Is that when I'm noticing that most of the resistance is happening? Or is it at the bottom? In the case of a bicep, for example, a preacher curl where my elbows are over a bench, the weight is going to be heavier or it's going to feel heavier at the bottom because that's when I'm directly opposing gravity. At the top of a preacher curl, it's much easier. Well, your elbow, you got to explain that. Your elbow is positioned underneath the weight which is then positioned on the pad which is supporting a lot of the weight. Yeah, I could do a full curl with a preacher curl, hold a heavy weight and kind of balance it there and that use a lot of my muscle to hold it up there. Now, that's much harder to do with a traditional standing curl because now I'm opposing gravity directly or a concentration curl, for example. So, angles for biceps and triceps matter in that regard. Hand position matters a lot for biceps. If my palm is facing straight up versus facing in or down, I'm working different parts of the bicep. For example, I talked about the brachialis. Hand facing in or down is going to use more brachialis than if my palm was facing up. Now, triceps, elbow position matters even more. Hand position doesn't make a big difference because if I put my elbow up above my head, like I'm doing an overhead tricep extension, the long head of my tricep, this is one of the parts of the tricep, actually attaches at my shoulder blade. So now it's in a stretched position. In fact, if you try to stretch your tricep, you probably put your arm by your head, you know, when you put your elbow up and bend your elbow all the way. That exercise with an overhead tricep extension because the long head is stretched, I'm going to work the long head a little bit more than if my elbows are at my sides. So, hand position for biceps matters, so does elbow position for biceps. For triceps, it's pretty much all elbow position that matters. Now, you just gave a really good explanation of all that and if you're somebody who's, I think, you know, somewhat advanced or intermediate, like this makes sense to you, but for a lot of people that are beginning, that might have been a lot of information. So, the way I simplify it for most people, so we don't get so nuanced about it, it's just literally the elbow position. So I just say, okay, listen, if we are going to do a tricep exercise, I want to do one of my exercises, I want to do with the elbow position above my head, I want to do one of my exercises with my elbow out in front of me, and then I want to do the elbow position down by my side. So an example of that would be a tricep pushdown, a skull crusher, and then an overhead extension. You've got three angles there, that's perfect with biceps, same thing. And if you want, you can throw in hand rotation. Am I doing an exercise where my palms are facing up and where my palms are maybe facing in like a hammer curl? But again, with elbow position, I could do an incline curl, where my elbows are behind my body. I could do a standing curl, elbows beside my body, and a preacher curl with the elbows in front of my body. So now you've got, because here's a deal, most workouts for arms will have more than one exercise. Very rarely will you see just one exercise for biceps, unless you're a beginner, or unless you're working out frequently throughout the week, in which case, same thing, if you're going to pick three different exercises, make them three different exercises that complement each other, which mainly should be elbow positioning and to a smaller degree hand positioning for biceps. Right, so to that point I was going to say, if you're somebody who's following like a split routine and you're doing three exercises for the bicep or the tricep in one single workout, I would vary it within that workout. If I'm following a more like full body routine, then I would just make sure that I'm varying that throughout the week, right? So maybe, you know, so Monday, let's just say you're a full body routine person. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you know, you do the elbow position by your side. On Mondays, Wednesday, it's out in front of you, and on Friday, it's overhead. So if you're doing three exercises within a workout, somebody running split, you can change the elbow positioning within that workout. If you're somebody who is running more of a full body routine, I'm going to change the elbow positioning by day, like that's the best way that I saw it. The way that they explain this back in the day, because, you know, bodybuilders for a long time observed changes in their body and tried to explain them. And they figured out a while ago that changing angles made a difference in developing their body. Now, they explained it wrong, and they would say things like, a preacher curl works the lower part of the bicep, and a concentration curl works the upper part of the bicep, and a barbell curl works the whole bicep, and hammer curl makes the bicep thicker, and stuff like that. That's not true. That part's not true. But what they were observing was that the different angles, if you combine them all in that fashion, you got better results. So this is very, very important. Pay attention to the positioning of your elbow, especially for triceps, but definitely for biceps, and then a little bit for the biceps, also hand position. This is how you should select your exercises. Don't select three different bicep exercises where they're all by your side. Palms up, dumbbell curls, palms up, barbell curls, palms up, cable curls, all with my elbows at my side, far less effective than what we were talking about earlier. That's the mistake that I was making. Forever I just assumed, because I was using a different tool, I was using a dumbbell, then I was using a cable, or then I was using a rope, but all of them, my elbow and my wrist were positioned the same way, not realizing that just because I'm, and the same thing goes for machines. A lot of times, pay attention to the way the machine sets you up. If same thing applies, just because you're on a different-looking apparatus, and it's colored different, it may feel different as far as the resistance, if your position of your elbow is the same on all those machines, you're getting a similar stimulus. And I think this actually, this goes and kind of feeds into our next point in terms of getting that full range of motion and what those different positions actually provide the full range of the ability of your muscle to contract in different angles. And so to really now take that through its full potential is way beneficial for muscle growth. Yeah, like when's the last, I think about this way, if you're listening right now, when's the last time you didn't exercise that you felt a lot of tension in the stretch of the bicep? Rarely. A lot of people don't pay attention to their bicep getting a stretch. Try doing an exercise like an incline curl where your elbows are slightly behind you and getting the biceps to fully extend. You won't, first of all, you will not be able to use nearly as much weight as you're used to. And if you don't train your bicep in the stretch position, watch what happens. I love that for that alternating. So I have one in that stretch position, and I curl and then I alternate it. Oh my God, that just kills. I remember doing this with preacher curls for the first time as a kid. I always stopped a preacher curl just short of full extension because I couldn't use nearly as much weight. And I remember working out with a friend of mine who was older, had very well-developed biceps, and he's like, dude, cut the weight in half and go all the way down and watch what happens. And it made a huge difference. Just that little, it was like an inch more range of motion. Well, I love it. So Sal took the notes for this episode. So after I looked at him, I'm like, this is great because you actually listed this in the order that I pieced it together as a kid. Yeah, same, right? No, seriously, like the very first like... First introduction, and then you start learning. No, totally. The first like aha moment was the elbow positioning. I had already spent years of the same, and I'm like, oh my God. And that was like, all of a sudden my arms responded. The next thing was the range of motion in the stretch position because, and maybe this is more of a guy thing, right? Tendency to cheat curls. Because you want to be able to say, I can curl in the 25s. It's all about how much you're doing. Now I'm curling the wheels. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, you care so much about increasing the weight on this little isolation exercise, which is ridiculous, that you tend to shorten the range of motion up and cheat the curls just so you can get more weight up. Not realizing how much you're robbing yourself of gains because you're not lightening the low, taking it through full range of motion. That was a big ego check for me as a young, insecure boy who was trying to build size on him. I was so excited to increase my dumbbell curls by five pounds or be able to throw a larger plate on my easy curl bar that I would sacrifice things like range of motion and doing things in the stretch position because it was difficult because I had to cut the weight in half in order to do it, not realizing how beneficial that would be to my gains if I just did that. Yeah, and even the squeeze. This one may be more important or I should say more neglected in triceps. Focus on that full extension and that squeeze with the triceps. And then for the bicep, when you close your elbow, pause for a second and squeeze the hell out of the bicep. Now, I see more people being okay with the squeeze of the bicep, probably because it's like them posing their bicep. But I do see short range of motion. This is very common with triceps where people don't go all the way out, lock out, and squeeze the tricep. That little bit of range of motion makes such a big difference. People don't know that. Well, you combine these points together. This could have been a whole separate point for me because here's another thing that people tend to do. And I know I did it too for a long time, is when you do the exercise, the hard part, the positive, curling the weight up, we put so much focus on that. And then we just let it come down. And we just let gravity take over the exercise. The exact same example that for the tricep would be doing a cable tricep pushdown and you focus on pushing down on the exercise, and then you let the cable swing. No emphasis on that eccentric part. Exactly. There's no emphasis on the eccentric portion of the exercise, which is extremely beneficial. It should be around at least a four-second tempo. So learning how to squeeze the bicep at the top of the curl or squeeze the tricep when you flex and extend the elbow, and not ending there. You squeeze and you flex, and then when you go into the negative, you resist it with that muscle and you focus on that. Boy, does that make a huge difference. Yeah, and too. And I know it's sort of back to the first point, but being able to maintain a nice upright posture through the entire time and not hunching over, especially doing a tricep extension, I see this all the time, even if they're using cables. Guys, when they get to those last few reps, they're leaning and hunched all the way down and shortening their range of motion, where the benefit there being a nice upright position, you're also teaching your body to do something that's more effective by maintaining these anchor points and being able to control your body while doing these movements. Yeah, and here's a little hack, okay? Because we mentioned angles and we mentioned squeeze and stretch. So here's a little hack, and I've just figured this out for myself and when I trained other people. Here's a nice way that I like to put exercises in order. I like to start with an exercise that I call a mid-range exercise, one that isn't emphasizing necessarily so much on the squeeze or the stretch. So for bicep, that might be like a bicep-standing barbell curl. For tricep, it may be like a skull crusher. Then I go to the stretch exercise. For biceps, that may be an incline curl. For triceps, that might be an overhead tricep extension. Really get a good squeeze. Always focus on the stretch and the squeeze, do both. And then finish off with an exercise that's really good with the squeeze. For whatever reason, following that order, the pumps are insane, absolutely insane. And I would write workouts like this for my clients. I'd look at mid-range, squeeze, exercise where the squeeze is crazy, and excuse me, where the stretch is crazy, and then exercise where the squeeze is crazy. For whatever reason, that order seems to work really, really well. But it does, and also keep in mind, that's the emphasis. If I'm doing overhead tricep extension, although I am squeezing at the top, I know that the key of that exercise is the stretch. So I'm going all the way down. I'm emphasizing the stretch and then extending at the top. And remember, there are certain exercises that lend themselves well to have a little bit of body English or where form isn't as crucial. When you're doing an isolation exercise, we're trying to isolate a part. Even though it's impossible to isolate a muscle, we're trying to as much as we possibly can. So doing a weight that you have to cheat at all or use momentum at all in it really starts to defeat the purpose of the isolation exercise. Because you cheat it and then other muscles come in to support it and help it. For doing a barbell back squat, there's so many things that are being worked that a little bit of momentum body English or if the form is slightly deviated whatsoever, you're still going to get a lot of the benefits from the movement. Where if you cheat a curl or you cheat a skull crusher and use momentum or let you like Justin was using the example of like cable push downs where people either let their shoulders roll and cave in and your chest kicks in, your delts kick in, you're getting very little work for the tricep and that's the whole point of the exercise. So taking your ego out of training arms is so crucial. They're such small muscles, it's very easy for the body to cheat the movement. So choosing a weight that's light enough that you can control and focus on the stretch and on the squeeze is so important. Yeah, and I can hear people right now being like, what about cheat curls? Arnold did cheat curls. Okay. First off, to do a cheat curl properly, you emphasize the negative. You cheat the weight up and then you control the descent with a really heavy weight. In fact, if you watch Arnold do cheat curls back in the day, you can tell that there was a lot of tension on the biceps and he was controlling it. You don't see that a lot, by the way. No, you don't. These days, people who cheat curl, either they do it for the videos, for the Instagram, they've already got developed arms because they've been working out for a long time and whatever. But really, if you do use a little bit of English with a cheat curl, emphasize the negative. So if you swing up a little bit, now when you go down, fight the negative on the way down. I don't recommend you do this all the time, though. I think excellent form, squeeze and stretch with control is superior 99% of time. 1% of time, you want to overload with a heavy cheat curl. Still, pay attention to the negative. Don't let the weight just fall. Otherwise, you're just training your ego. To me, that's such an advanced exercise. Yes, it is. You have to have mechanics down really, really well, understand biomechanics, understand what we're trying to accomplish to take advantage of advanced exercises like that. Otherwise, I mean, to be honest, I'm trying to remember, I mean, I definitely can count on one hand. I don't have, I never had any clients. Yeah, I can count on one hand how many times I've taught this. Like, you just, there's no need for it. You can make such great gains on your arms without ever including cheat exercises or more momentum type exercises. And that's not to say, okay, for those that are advanced lifters that are listening right now, that there's not value in it. Does that mean I've never, I've absolutely, yes, I've done cheat curls. I like cheat curls. But I also have been training for a very long time, understand what I'm trying to get out of that exercise. So for the average person that is trying to build, sculpt or shape their arms, there's not a lot of value here until you become more of an advanced lifter. Absolutely. Now the next one, this one really moved the dial for me when I really figured this out. And that was to train my, and this has to, this goes for my whole body, but especially for my arms, train them more frequently. You know, when I first started working out and for a long time, what was communicated in the popular fitness magazines was to train a bicep or tricep or a muscle group really, really hard and then let it rest and recover for a full week. So when you looked at the traditional workouts at the time, it was like, you know, arm day was Tuesday or whatever, or bicep day was Tuesday and triceps was Wednesday. And you hit it hard, you did your 12, 15 sets or whatever, and then leave it alone till the next week and then work it out again. When I started to really figure out that my arm, that my body responded better to more frequent training, everything exploded, including my arms. In fact, for the longest time as a kid, my arms could not surpass 17 inches which doesn't sound like a huge amount. This isn't, you know, I'm natural, I'm not a genetic freak, but it could not surpass 17 until I started training my arms three days a week. This is what I did. And this is how I wrote my programs for my clients afterwards and this is what you'll find in most of the maps programs is I took the total weekly volume and I divided it up over three weeks. So instead of doing 15 sets for biceps on Monday, I did five sets on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. That increased frequency made a tremendous difference. Now today, we have studies to support this. Today, the best studies show that training muscle groups two to four days a week is the best way to maximize growth and to get them to respond. I think there's other reasons for that too, right? So when, and I think anybody who's trained arms before and or trained them to failure has experienced this, like there comes a point where that muscle gets so fatigued that your body does not want to use it anymore for that movement and then the other muscles, they take over. And I found this a lot when I was doing splits. So when I was doing splits and had an armed day, yeah, exercise one and two seemed really valuable. Like I could control it really well. I'm getting this massive pump. But by the time I got to exercise three and four, they were so burnt out that the majority of the movement was no longer the bicep or the tricep that all the other muscles are starting to cheat. So just simply spreading it out over the week gets all the benefits that you're talking about, Sal. Then it also gets the benefits of you don't fatigue the muscles so much that you have to be so good at thinking about form and working that and not allowing the other one. So I feel like it's kind of too prompt. So all the things you talked about I think are important. But the value that I found from it was, man, when my muscles weren't so gassed on these small muscles, it made it a lot easier to stay focused on them when I was lifting and not taking them to failure all the time. It would cause the other body parts to kick in. Yeah, I totally stumbled across this by accident and really like your trigger session concept of being able to do that in between but with like moderate to low intensity. So like repeating a lot of these movements, curls, and tricep extensions and things with rubber bands in between like my regular foundational type of workouts I was doing with the team just because I was waiting for guys to get rehabbed. And so I'm in this training facility anyways where they get rehabbed. There's bands there. I'm kind of waiting in and around. And I saw the most muscle growth I've ever seen in my arms just simply because I just kept that going. Oh yeah. If you, let's say you train your arms two or three days a week with good, hard, effective workouts. Let's say you're following a program like Maps and a Ballet which will have you training your arms as well as other muscle groups two to three days a week depending on your experience level. On the days in between, here's what you can do. Get a little bit of an arm pump every single day. That's it. And that a hard one, you're not going crazy with the workout. But give yourself about eight minutes and give yourself a little bit of an arm pump. Try this a couple times a day on the days off in between. Watch what happens to your arms. It's crazy at how fast it responds. They respond to this kind of frequency. Well, I think this is a perfect time also to include the conversation around BFR. So when you're talking about trigger and frequency another great frequency builder is BFR. This was something that I found way later in my career. I wasn't using it during this time. But another thing that doesn't do a lot of damage but then you chase the pump, you get that frequency and there is doing things like BFR. We haven't talked about that in a really long time. I think it's been a few years since we wrote the BFR guide but there's a ton of value in using that as a frequency builder also. Absolutely. And again, the whole body responds well to frequency but small muscle groups especially because they don't tax the body as much when you're training them super frequently. So you could do lots and lots of arm workouts and watch how your body responds and of course if you start getting diminishing returns back off a little bit but studies show and this confirms my experience about two to four days a week of good hard workouts and then in between some frequency builders like a trigger session where you're just kind of getting a little bit of a pump that makes a huge difference. Now the last one, this one took me a little while to figure out especially for biceps because I knew this for other muscle groups and basically what this says is compound movements build more muscle than isolation movements. Now this made sense for my legs. I knew that squats built my muscles bigger and faster my legs than leg extensions and leg curls. Back. I knew this for my back like rows and pull-ups did a better job of building my back than a cable straight arm pull down or a pull over. I knew that bench presses and incline presses built my chest more than flies or cable crossovers. I knew that overhead presses developed my shoulders faster and better than laterals did but for arms I didn't really ever consider this. In fact, you know for triceps I knew there were some compound movements like dips and close grip bench press. For biceps I had no idea. I thought all bicep exercises were isolation. Totally not true. What's true for the quads and the hamstrings which is that squats will build them more and faster than leg extensions and leg curls. Because remember your legs are like your arms really no different. Your quads are like your triceps. Your quads extend your knee just like your triceps extend your elbow. Your hamstrings will be like your biceps. They flex the knee just like your biceps flex your arm. For the arms this is true as well. A curl grip chin up. So when you're doing a chin up with your palms facing back and you're pulling up and at the top you're squeezing your biceps really hard getting full extension. That's a compound exercise for the biceps. Talk about the ultimate version of full range of motion. And the other cool part to that is not I know some people like pull-ups are fairly easy. I know that's probably a rare few or like your body weight isn't that high but you know for me it was always a struggle but then I started to get good at it. And so you know what I found later though too is not about always like how many reps I could get I could actually add weight to myself now and just do a few reps and get a totally different experience out of it as well. Well Sal always shares his bicep bunny hop story. So I have a story for this. Like when this all came together for me I wasn't even focused on biceps. I just I don't remember of course I probably read some silly article how to build your back and had something to do with pull-ups and starting every workout with pull-ups. And I went on this kick of like I would do 50 pull-ups before every single workout. I did the same thing. Yeah and I started off I started every back workout like that for I did this for like six months and you know the goal was eventually get to a point could I do 50 I never got to a point where I could do 50 in a row but I did get to a point where I could do high 20s almost 30 reps of pull-ups. As a side effect what I saw aside from my back getting really strong and good at pull-ups was my biceps grew like crazy. And so that was kind of when that light bulb went off for me and then I started to think okay what are some other really good compound exercises for the arms and that's what made led me over to doing the close grip bench press for my triceps. Also was the biggest thing that ever changed my triceps was getting into that. And I prefer the incline I just think that it's easier to get in the right position it's more comfortable for this. I think you get more elbow flexion extension too because of the angle right? Yeah so I really really love an incline elbows in tight by your side close grip bench press and part of what has to be the major benefits is the load right? Like you just you're not going to be able to load a straight bar curl that heavy. Even someone who's really really strong is what maybe doing a hundred and something pounds but pulling your body weight where you're weighing 150 to 200 plus pounds that's a lot when you're doing pull-ups. Same thing goes for an enclosed bench press. I might be able to skull crush you know a hundred and something pounds but I could do an enclosed bench press up to 200 and something pounds so just the simple fact that you're able to load these movements on these smaller these smaller muscles would make them blow up. Oh yeah and here's how you do strength training heavy strength training for your arms because it's hard to do you know four rep sets for you know try you know bicep curls or a tricep press down it's just going to be it's going to be terrible form and isolation exercises don't work really well for super low reps but can I do a heavy curl grip chin up for four reps or a heavy close grip bench press or dips for four reps absolutely and then I can build that kind of strength on it so here's here's how you do by the way that the the chin up for biceps because any chin up is going to work your biceps but here's how you can emphasize it get your supinated grip pull yourself up when you get up to the top try to curl your bicep as hard as you can and prepare yourself for the most intense bicep burn and squeeze you've ever had in your life it's actually quite brutal it's one of the few times I feel like my biceps gonna rip off my arm no bicep exercise will do that but you I pull myself up when I get up to the top rather than leaning back like I normally would with a chin up to squeeze my back I get up to the bar and I curl my arms as hard as I can holy cow does that recommend okay so from the functional world you guys have your like Arnold cheat curls and like I'm not I don't identify with that but I do identify with is basically these muscle ups where they use a lot of momentum to get into a position where you're in such a low range of motion to dig your way out of and and and literally dip your way up and lock out so there's lots of ways that people have tried to just be able to accomplish a muscle up and when I was going through this entire year of doing body weight training that was a goal of mine is to do a strict muscle up and to make that happen I had to start just with rings where I could get as literally as low as I could possibly go with the range of motion and be able to control and dig my way out of that had the most enormous growth just from really just trying to attempt it now do you think that some of that has to do with it's probably one of the best ways to do a heavy loaded isometric exercise oh you're holding yourself at the top so much tension involved it's it's insane right there's not a lot of tricep or bicep exercise that I can think of that are that it's going to because it's loading your body weight it's forcing you right and you have to stay in at the bottom of it you're not rested so you're having to hold that tension and that isometric tension has to be one of the best things that you could possibly do and I probably respond so well to so many people because they just don't include that into their routine that's right it's a heavy load it forces you to get a good squeeze it's the same thing with the chin up that I just talked about where you're up at the top and you're really squeezing your bicep when are you going to have that much weight on your biceps with that much tension right there is no isolation exercise that does that exactly dips do the same thing I like to strap weight around my body do heavy dips and at the top of the dip I'll hold myself for a second and squeeze my triceps now I can do low rep strength training for my arms and then I can move to the isolation stuff where I'm focusing on you know different angles that gets the arms to respond like crazy so there you have it use more angles look at elbow position for both biceps and triceps and hand position to a lesser extent for the biceps focus on stretch and squeeze full range of motion train your arms two to four days a week with hard workouts throwing some trigger sessions or some BFR on the days in between and then don't forget the compound exercises for biceps and triceps they build muscle in your arms just like they do for your legs and your bigger muscle groups okay so I think what we should do is give some giveaways here like our top 10 favorite arm exercises five for triceps five for biceps hopefully you're doing these hopefully you're doing these so for triceps we have dips great compound exercise for the triceps another great compound exercise for the triceps your close grip bench press then you have your skull crushers that's a great one with the elbows in front of your body the overhead tricep extension that's where your elbow is pointed over your head and you're getting that stretch and then your tricep press down variations that's great for squeezing the triceps then for biceps great compound exercise for the biceps I talked about this earlier curl grip pull-ups or also known as chin-ups then you have your incline curls that gives you that nice stretch position of the biceps your preacher curls this is where your elbows in front of your body your traditional barbell curls elbows at your side of your body nice heavy isolation exercise and then hammer curls now you're working with the hand position this one works the brachialis look you can check out our big arms guide because we referenced that a little bit in this episode but there's more information on there on how to develop your arms you can find that at mindpumpfree.com also if you want to check out all of our different maps workout programs we have lots of different programs designed for different people with different goals go to mapsfitnessproducts.com well I didn't go crazy you know what I'm saying I wasn't trying to get totally ripped by myself but I was like you know I was setting the mood for the night I'm like I got uh got my my yeah your music on yeah my incense burning the music playing I'm getting ready for your Costco size movie fat of lube yeah I was alone too last night we'll get to your night