What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today I'm going to tell you the truth about my arms.
Today I'm going to show you exactly the exercises that I used to build my arms.
My arms, guys, they're 17.5" big.
Now, to some that might be big.
To others that might be puny.
I've been called puny before, and my arms aren't any "big shit".
They're nothing.
All right, the fact is I wanted Hulk Hogan's 21" pythons when I was younger.
I grew up watching the WWE.
I'm going to fall short of that goal, but I laid a solid foundation, and I didn't really
have – I'm going to walk over here and show you what I did.
I didn't have a real genetic advantage growing up.
This isn't a genetic thing.
"Oh, Jeff's arms are genetic."
They're not.
My father would never be confused with someone that's fighting Bluto, chasing a girl named
Olive Oil.
My mother was 5 feet tall, she didn't have great genetics.
The fact is, my arms were also very small as I grew up, which led me to want to do something
about it.
The only thing I had was dumbbells.
Not this whole damned thing.
I literally had a few dumbbells, and I had a bench, and that's all I did.
But I used two exercises.
And that's the truth.
The truth is I literally built my arms, the foundation of my arms, off two exercises.
But it was how I did them that made all the difference.
So the first exercise was literally a dumbbell curl.
It didn't get until later in my life I actually could afford a barbell.
My brother actually bought it, I couldn’t.
I started to use that and that became my new favorite.
But I used dumbbells to begin and what I would do is I would perform my bicep curls.
The great thing that I had at my disposal is, I had a few sets of dumbbells so I could
easily add weight to this exercise to allow for progressive overload.
If you've watched my video I just did the other day on how you build muscle, one of
the main ways to do that was to increase either the weight on the bar – the weight that
you're using in your hands to do this exercise – or increase the volume.
Well, volume was another friend of mine.
I would put it down and do another set, then do another set.
I didn't even have much going in my life back then, guys.
I didn't have time to do more sets.
I did video games, or doing a few sets of dumbbell curls.
So do them in between commercial breaks, just to give you an idea.
Not a real sophisticated plan, but it worked.
The next thing I did, was take a lighter weight – maybe not 10s – but I would take a lighter
weight and I would abbreviate the range of motion.
So I'd get up to the top here, and I didn't know what I was doing at the time, but again,
as you watch that video you come to realize that what I was doing was basically creating
a more metabolic overload, where I would abbreviate the range of motion, and I liked the feel
of the contraction.
So I'd stay up here and I'd contract, contract, contract, feel the burn – which I'm feeling
right now, by the way, still with 10lbs – and I would contract away, and try to resist that
burn.
Basically creating an occlusion effect inside this muscle, not really letting the blood
escape, and exit that muscle.
So it would create that metabolic overload.
So that was another way I was doing it.
Then I wasn't afraid to pick up the heaviest set of dumbbells that I had and curl them
that way.
So here, I curl them up, here, and then come down slower, and come down slow.
Even if I had to cheat them up, where I could lean a little bit, but then eccentrically
slowly lower them down.
What I'm saying to you is that this was one of the most effective methods for me because
there's an endpoint.
I needed other tactics.
So I could for an extremely heavy set of dumbbells and just worry about lowering them slowly.
That gave me that all important, third way, creating eccentric muscle damage and soreness
to achieve the outcome of bigger arms.
So when it comes to building arms you need all three of those tactics.
I didn't even realize that I was using all three, but I was.
I was doing it with a single exercise.
Here, I do the same thing for my triceps.
The second exercise I relied on was a dumbbell tricep extension, where I'd lay on a bench,
put the dumbbells up, and again, I learned quickly that in this position I don’t have
a lot of overload on the triceps.
By setting my arms back 20 or 30 degrees, now they're working just to hold them there.
It also preset my arms to get a bigger stretch at the bottom and that's how I performed them.
But the key was, I applied the same principles.
I'd do regular dumbbell tricep extensions, controlled, and I'd try to add weight whenever
I could.
I tried to increase volume.
Like I said, commercial breaks whenever I could.
Probably too much, really.
And then I would use heavy weights, get them up here, and really try to slow down the eccentric
all the way down, and stretch, cheat them up if I had to, come down here, eccentric,
and stretch all the way through.
Then the same thing applies here, too.
I would take a lighter weight, get in position – again, not at the same time.
Just throughout the development of my arms.
Building that foundation, I would get into this abbreviated position here, right there
in the contraction, and I'd crank away.
I would do a lot of these sets until I couldn’t take it anymore.
What it also taught me was how to resist the burn.
I actually got comfortable with the burn.
I actually enjoyed the feeling of the burn, but the truth is, all the foundation in my
arms were built off two exercises because that's all I had.
Now these days, I've actually continued to make gains in my arms from where I was in
those formative years.
I've done it by using a lot of other arm exercises.
Mostly from variation, to keep me interested.
Even some exercises allow me to explore different strength curves so that my biceps could get
a little more complete development because I'm hitting all those different areas of the
strength curve, and overloading all those different areas of the strength curve, and
the same thing happens with the triceps, too.
But if you're sitting in a place right now where your arms are just not good, and you
want to do something about it; you don’t have to be discouraged.
You literally can take the same path that I did.
That is: limit the choices, take your two exercises – those are my two favorite, for
all the reasons I just said – and learn how to apply the different techniques, and
utilize the different strategies for growth, and you'll start seeing some serious gains.
Guys, my Ultimate Arms program is one that I built off all the principles that I wound
up using, all the way up until current day that still get me results.
It's actually a program we put together that's available for you over at ATHLEANX.com.
By the way, it's not just arm training.
We literally cover legs, and shoulders, and chest, and everything else.
It's a very important program, I think, that helps to prioritize your arms if you don’t
like where yours are right now, without ignoring the rest of your body.
Again, that's available over at ATHLEANX.com.
In the meantime, if you've found the video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up
below.
Let me know what else you want to see here on this channel and I'll do my best to do
that for you.
In the meantime, somebody else is actually using the same very principles that I did
to build bigger arms.
Jessie, could you hand me the camera really quick?
You want to flex one?
There you go.
Nice work.
There you go, guys.
It works.
It doesn't just work, like I said, genetics is not part of it.
This kid's got the shittiest genetics I've ever seen in my life.
He knows I love him.
All right, guys.
Talk to you soon.
See you.