In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin cover what it takes to build impressive arms.
   The reasons why training arms is so popular. (1:47)
   The muscles of the arms, pivotal moments training them, and the best exercises you can do to sculpt and shape them. 
   #1 – Biceps. (5:59)
    Compound lift: Chin up (Supinated grip).
   Best exercises: Preacher curls, standing curls, and incline curls.
    #2 – Triceps. (17:05)
    Best exercises: Press down, skull crusher, and overhead extension.
   Compound lift: Dips, close grip press.
    #3 – Forearms. (26:49)
    Best exercises: Wrist curls, reverse wrist curls, and farmer walks.
    Order of operations, sets, and reps. (28:56)
   Related Links/Products Mentioned
   For a limited time only, Mind Pump listeners get a free LMNT Sample Pack with any purchase: Visit DrinkLMNT.com/MindPump
   June Promotion: MAPS Cardio or Summer Shredded Bundle or the Bikini Bundle 50% off! **Code JUNE50 at checkout**
   Mind Pump #1950: Shoulder Building Masterclass
   Build Your Biceps with Angles – Mind Pump TV
   Get BIG Biceps By Doing Chin-Ups! (SECRET WEAPON) - YouTube
   Preacher Curls Are What Your Bicep Workouts Have Been Missing!
   The ONLY Way You Should Be Doing Dumbbell Bicep Curls!
   How To Do Hammer Curls for HUGE Biceps (BICEP GROWTH!)
   Build Your Triceps with Angles – Mind Pump TV
   Do Cable Tricep Pushdowns Like THIS (RIGHT WAY!)
   How to Do SKULLCRUSHERS with Dumbbells for BIG Triceps (ADVANCED)
   Tricep Extension Dumbbell One Arm Workout | MIND PUMP
   How To Do Chest Dips For A BIG Chest!
   The ONLY Forearm Workout That Matters (TRY THIS!!) | MIND PUMP
   5 Exercises For HUGE Forearms & A STRONGER Grip
   Add Size to Your Traps with Farmer Walks
   Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube
   Mind Pump Free Resources
    

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only 1 place to go.

With your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews.

You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast in the world.

Ooh, today's episode is all about the arms.

We talk about training the biceps, the triceps, and even the forearms, how they work, best exercises, Things to focus on, things to ignore.

If you want to develop amazing arms, this is the episode for you.

Now, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, Element.

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It's all natural, no calories, no artificial sweeteners, and it has the right amount of sodium for performance and pumps during your workout.

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This is probably 1 of the most prized body parts, biceps, triceps, forearms.

This is why people like to develop them, men and women.

So in today's episode, we're gonna talk all about the muscles of the arms and the best Exercises you can do to sculpt and shape amazing arms this

This is the killing it the first body part ever trained I think

okay So well when you guys were younger, was this the main 1?

Yeah, because I was terrible at bench So even my buddy that try and definitely do legs as a kid.

I mean that was like crazy Yeah, you know, I don't screw up my basketball skills whatever the excuse was I used back then as a kid, didn't want to do legs for sure.

And when they tried to get me to bench press, my form was so terrible.

I've told you guys before, it took like 3 guys.

1 guy would pin my shoulders down, the other 2 guys would spot the bar.

And then I was like 135 pounds, like just terrible.

So yeah, all arms, all arms, like all the time.

And when I got into being a personal trainer, I had trained them so frequently, so often for all my early years, teenage years, that they became really stubborn.

Like I could just, you couldn't hammer my arms and I wouldn't get sore.

No, for, I mean, I always train kind of everything right out the gates, because right out the gates I bought books and followed routines.

And there's that story when I met those power lifters type of deal.

But I mean, there's a reason why arms are so popular.

It's because it's a proxy for a strong physique, meaning, You know, for the most part, if anything's exposed, unless you're at the beach or something like that, right?

If anything's exposed, it's usually your arms.

And if you have muscular, fit-looking arms, it typically tells the person that The rest of you is fit.

So it's no wonder why it's such a popular body part to train.

There was a time when women didn't want to train arms, but then it became popular for women as well because you know, they realized like, well, I'm not going to get big arms.

I'm gonna get nice sculpted looking arms.

And women's arms are shown as often, if not more often than men's.

So now what's funny is this is so many myths that surround arm training, that this will be fun.

This will be a fun thing to talk about in terms of like, what are the best exercises or the best, even more importantly, what are the best combination of exercise to develop, you know, to get well-developed arms.

But we're going to talk about like the basic because there's more muscles than the ones we're going to highlight today.

There's lots of lots of small muscles that are in there and stuff like that.

even gonna cover the shoulders, we're just sticking with-

We did a whole shoulder masterclass already, didn't we?

And I definitely think that, you know, refer to that episode because I do think that when in pursuit of like aesthetic looking arms-

Yeah, that makes as much of a difference, if not more.

In fact, I think I have smaller arms today than I did in my early 20s, but I have better looking arms because my- Because

They're more proportionate to my shoulders.

It's typically not hard to connect to the muscles of the arms, which is kind of cool, mainly because we still use our hands and arms.

We haven't reached the point yet where we're completely machine or whatever, a computer.

So I can almost always get someone to feel their biceps, feel their triceps, and feel their forearms if I want them to.

So this isn't really an area where typically it's like, ooh, we got to figure out a way to get

So I don't, there is sometimes with tricep though.

Tricep sometimes can be more difficult for some clients to feel and I don't want to mess up the flow of your your episode right here but I am curious like do you guys remember like of all the things that we learned and what we're probably gonna talk about in this episode as far as exercise selection and lifts and sets and reps and all these different things.

Do you remember what were some of the most pivotal things that like, or aha moments when training arms were?

I know, there was a big 1 for me that was like made a huge difference.

was probably the same thing for me, it was the elbow position.

Like I didn't understand how you were manipulating the strength curve and with the stretch position versus, I didn't learn that until I learned like biomechanics later on.

They attach, um, you know, here underneath the elbow and then right at the shoulder or a bit higher, there's 2 heads of the bicep.

So because the attachments way up here near the shoulder, I can make my bicep shorter simply by lifting my elbow.

And I can make it a bicep longer by putting my elbow behind my body because it'll automatically lengthen or shorten by the position of my elbow.

So that's what we mean by elbow position.

I can do exercises where my bicep's shortened.

I can do a position exercise where my bicep is lengthened.

And then I can change the resistance so that it's hardest when I'm squeezing or it's hardest when it's stretched or extended.

And those are the factors to consider when you're training biceps along with, this is different for triceps, but for biceps, hand position also matters.

If you were to look at your bicep right now, if you were to kind of partially flex your arm, take your palm facing up and then have your palm facing down and then facing up, you'll notice your bicep shortens and lengthens.

1 of the actions of the bicep is also to rotate the hand.

So that also is something you want to consider when you do bicep exercise.

Yeah, 1 of the things I was thinking of when I was just young and just starting out and especially doing curls was, I was doing a preacher curl and then my range of motion was tiny.

Yeah, I was just come down and then bring it back up and like get a squeeze and I thought I was doing something and then like I remember yeah, a bodybuilder or somebody came over and was like, yeah, you want to go all the way and I was like I had to drop like a ton of weight.

Like it was very humbling, but then I was like, oh wow, okay, I have to go all the way down.

And so I applied that again to the elbow position on all the other exercises, but that was like a huge thing.

If I was just doing short reps all the time.

me, 3 things that were very huge moments in my arm training for that.

Range of motion, elbow positioning, and compound lifts for that.

Because it was popular when I first started learning to do all these isolation exercises.

Well, almost every bicep exercise is isolation.

Yeah, so there's- And the ones that are compound are not called bicep exercises.

Right, so it's like a sneaky way for your biceps to build and nobody would label it as that.

And so I totally ignored that in my bicep and tricep training.

I ignored the compound lifts that didn't fall under that category because they were either a bench press or a pull-up or these movements that were for your back or your chest.

And so you're like, oh, this isn't for my triceps.

And also, I was still in that trap when I was a kid of thinking that just because I felt it the most in an exercise that it must be building that muscle, and that's a fallacy.

Like there's exercises sometimes, and we know this when we talk about things like legs, like a leg extension, you're going to feel your quads more than

Yeah, they're going to be on fire compared to a squat, but they ain't going to come close to building your legs like a squat will.

And it's like, we knew that, that's obvious, but for some reason, that same principle, people, it's not obvious to them when it comes to their biceps and their triceps, but

The craziest mass builder you'll ever do, just overall development of your bicep, is going to be a supinated grip chin-up or pull-down.

This is a compound lift for the bicep, okay?

Just like we do compound lifts for the chest, the back, the legs, and we know that those are the best for the bicep suit.

Now, I do wanna say this, the technique's a little different, okay?

If I do a supinated grip pull-up, I'm leading with my chest and I'm squeezing back.

If I'm doing it from my biceps, I'm rolling forward and I'm pulling with my arms.

You're trying to bring your knuckles towards your chest.

Yes, I would look like what I'm doing is bad form.

if someone saw me do a bicep pull down like this, you might be like, oh, he does it, that's a crappy looking pull down.

No, no, I am emphasizing the bicep on the way down versus the back with my chest out.

But try those, try do, first off, a chin up this way, most people aren't strong enough to do it this way, So you'd have to do a pull down but grab the bar and curl it down with this kind of rolled forward position and squeeze the biceps at the bottom.

You have now done a compound lift for your biceps and they do

feel the difference when you do they build.

this and I've done chin-ups like this where I'm only doing 3 or 4 reps and the biceps just let up.

So you've talked before about how like certain muscle groups or how low reps only lend themselves to certain muscle groups.

This is the exception for, like, and we've talked about like, you know, 3 rep range doesn't do much, isn't a typical way you would lift biceps.

Yeah, no, it's just too much isolation exercise 3 times

and your form is going to be off and yeah, 100% kick

in the shoulders and everything else to get it up.

So the 3 basic elbow positions you want your bicep exercises to fall under would be elbows in front of your body, elbows next to your body, and then elbows behind your body.

So here's 3 exercises that fit that category, which is great.

Because elbows in front shortens the biceps, to the sides it's kind of neutral, you know, kind of in the middle.

Behind the body there's a stretch when you do a full extension.

So the best exercises, or some of the best exercises like this are preacher curls, elbows in front of my body, standing curls, barbell or dumbbell by my body, and then incline curls where I'm sitting back on an incline, my elbows are behind my body.

Those 3 exercises right there hits all 3 elbow positions.

And then there's a muscle that we should probably talk about that you if you want well-developed biceps, you also need to work on which is the brachialis

And this is a flat muscle underneath the bicep.

And when it develops, it really gives you this nice full look to your arm.

This muscle flexes the elbow and it's most activated with a what's called a neutral grip a hammer curl a hammer curl will develop the Brachialis pretty damn well.

well, so okay now talk about programming that and how I do this So if I back when I was doing like body part splits and arms would be like an arm day, I'm actually going to do an exercise that hits each 1 of those in the workout.

If I'm following more of a MAPS anabolic routine.

Where I'm doing 1 exercise, I do 1 on Monday, a different 1 on Wednesday, a different 1 on Friday for the week so that in the week I get all 3 elbow positions.

So that's how I would program that is I want to in a week's time I want to make sure I hit all 3 elbow positions whether I'm doing all that arm workout in 1 or 2 workouts, or I'm spreading it over 3 or 4 workouts, I wanna make sure within the week, I'm hitting all 3 major elbow positions.

And then I'm gonna stay with those exercises for an extended period of time in order to get good at them, right?

So I wanna stick with those 3 movements that you're saying for at least, you know, 468 weeks and Then I'm gonna change the exercises up too.

I'm gonna people you'd be like, well, what's the difference elbows in front of you preacher curl versus another elbows in front of exercise Well, here's now where it gets interesting.

A preacher curl, especially a free weight preacher curl, most of the resistance is at the bottom because that's where gravity is fighting the most.

Here at the top, there's not much resistance because now my forearm is perpendicular to the weight and into gravity.

Well, if I do a concentration curl, where I'm leaning over, my elbow's still in front of my body, but now the hardest part of the rep is the squeeze.

I'm doing elbow in front of my position exercise, but the squeeze is the hardest, not the extension.

So I would switch out preacher curls for something like a concentration curl because it's the squeeze now.

Well, yeah, you're talking about triceps.

Then you're talking about skull crusher being the top position right here.

And then you're talking like, say, you're doing like a tricep extension for neutral.

I mean, obviously that's probably not the best 1, but then, and then dips.

But with the, back to your point with the biceps, like, so another thing to manipulate your point.

So you could also do a preacher curl with dumbbells for that for 4 weeks.

And then I go over to a preacher curl on a machine.

So people have to understand that like you can do dumbbell curls on the which I love to do or a camber curl bar on a preacher bench.

Same preacher bench, but now I'm on a machine, right?

That's attached to it or whatever because of the way the tension is on it.

So that is a way of taking a movement that is the same, but then changing it because you are changing the tension on it throughout the strength.

By the way, if you use a bicep machine, you can figure this out by looking at the pulley and the shape of the pulley, and you'll notice that it won't be perfectly circular.

It'll maybe be oval shaped or be kind of odd shaped.

And you can tell when the resistance is gonna get harder.

So some machines on a preacher curl, even though it says 50 pounds on the stack, it's actually 30 at the bottom, 50 at the top.

Now, you might not be able to know this by looking at it, if you're not experienced, go try it.

Go try the exercise, notice the most difficult part of the rep, and then the next time you do a similar exercise, find 1 where the hardest part of the rep is in a different position.

By the way, bands are a great way to do this.

I used to do this at home when I was a kid.

This is before I knew anything about bands.

All I knew was, wow, this preacher curls easy up here.

So I attached a band around the bar and I attached around a pole and I knew that the band would make it harder at the top and I used to blow my friends away whenever I try that

you know I was I was always surprised why those machines didn't get I don't know more talk like as far as I You think so that's

why I guess that people don't know to change that pin that changes the pulley position.

So what the your your American barbell, which was gold when you work there, they still have some of those.

I love those and you can change and they so there's these machines if you've ever seen them.

So we can educate the audience that doesn't know what this is.

Some gyms will have like the preacher curl machine and then on the right normally right on the side where the where the wheel is or whatever there'll be a handle that you pull out and it normally has numbers 1 2 or 3 and what you're doing is you're changing the heaviest part of the weight to be either in the stretch position at the middle position

which is a cool way to manipulate an exercise that is in the same plane, is virtually the same thing, but now because you manipulate that, it's novel to the muscle because it's not used to the load hitting you like that.

But if you just picked an exercise from elbows in front, elbows aside, elbows in back, you're 90-something percent of the way there.

Throw in some chin-ups where your bicep emphasize, you know, a squeeze.

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2100: Big Arms Masterclass