Want to know why you're not growing? Why? Because you're squatting in the curl rack.
Oh yeah. You want to know why you re not growing? Why? Because you're not trying hard enough.
Get it? Try? Triceps?
Actually, guys, if your arms have been stuck at the same size for a long time now,
likely it's because you're doing some things wrong. Today, I'm going to share with you the
five most likely reasons why you're not making arm gains. Today, we re going to fix them.
What's up, guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx.com. So if you're looking to grow your arms,
but they just aren't listening to you then today you should listen to me because I'm
going to share with you five reasons of why your arms aren't grown right now.
That being said, these are things that you probably aren't even aware of right now,
so how could you blame yourself? After today, though, you're going to be armed
with the right information to get the job done. Let's start breaking them down one by one.
All right. So if you're trying to get bigger arms and they're not looking the way you want them to,
the first thing you have to do is ask yourself, how am I training them right now?
And the first big mistake that you could be making is you're doing no direct arm work.
See, there's three different ways people tend to train their arms. Number one,
there's the minimalist approach. People that say, listen, I'm just going to train my biceps through
my heavy compound exercises like rows and chin ups. Or I'm going to train my triceps through
my heavy compound pushing exercises like, let's say, dips, a bench press or an overhead press.
Now, while that will help you to certainly grow bigger arms, not to mention the rest of your body,
it may not be the best approach because you're simply not getting enough volume or direct arm
volume needed to grow them maximally. And that's what we're talking about here in
this video. So the second approach people will take is the nuts-and-bolts approach,
where they take two exercises the big heavy hitter. Let's say, a close group bench press and
a barbell curl and they simply incorporate them in whatever split they're following right now.
So if they're following a push pull a leg split, they might do the barbell curl on their pull day
and the close grip bench press on their push day. And they continue to rotate that, accruing some
of that additional volume over the course of a training block and multiple training blocks.
Or they do what I recommend here, and that is the direct arm training approach, meaning
either an added arm training day or separate them out biceps and triceps.
Because the exercise variation is now expanded to include things like the standing dumbbell curl
or the spider curl or the waiter curl or for triceps push downs, overhead extensions,
cobra pushups line tricep extensions. And as you can see here in a second, these exercises
all provide unique benefits individualistic from each other that add to the equation.
It's not just a one plus one equals two, it's a one plus two equals five equation here, when we
start to get an added benefit and the additional volume helps us to grow not just bigger biceps and
triceps, but more esthetically pleasing. You're going to want to start doing this instead.
So let's say you're actually doing direct arm work, but you're making the second big mistake,
and that is not applying science to your selection of exercises. See, we have two things we need
to consider if we're going to put the science back in strength. And that is number one, what
is the strength curve of the exercises that we're doing and also what part of the muscle that we're
training are we actually working? And those all have to be considered if you want to get the best
growth out of your arms from the exercise that you're doing. So look at here, a barbell curl
has a strength curve that's most difficult in the middle of the exercise. But a spider curl,
like you see here actually gets most difficult at the very end of the exercise, not so much in
the middle here. So doing both of these exercises in your bicep training would help to complement
and fill in that all important gap. The same thing can happen here at the tricep
push down. If you're starting the exercise with your arms at your chest as you should,
you're going to have the most tension on the triceps in the beginning of the exercise, and
it's actually going to drop as your arms get down into full extension. Even though the triceps are
maximally contracted down there, the resistance there is actually going to go down because in the
physics of the movement. However, with a tricep kick back oftentimes kicked to the curb shouldn't
be because they're the resistance actually peaks at the end of the exercise at the end of the range
of motion. So complementing these two exercises would be something really valuable for you.
That said, it goes even further than that when you're trying to get the most out of your arm
development. For example, in your biceps if your workouts look like strict curls, no money curls,
and modified preacher curls, while the three really good exercises, you're basically just doing
exercises that focus their effort on the short head of the biceps. We know that the long head
could be more preferentially activated by having the arm back behind our body, applying a stretch
to the bicep, by getting the armpit to extension to allow for better recruitment there.
Again, your bicep contracts both the long and the short head every time it flexes the elbow.
However, we can get favorable activation of one head versus the other, and it's something you
need to consider. So you want to make sure you included things like incline dumbbell curls,
drag curls, or even the waiters curl again to more favorably hit that long head. The same thing
can be said about your triceps, too if your tricep workout look like push downs, close grip bench and
diamond pushups, these are all working the lateral and medial head of the triceps really well.
Not getting enough of that full activation that's possible of the long head by including exercises
like overhead extensions and drag push downs. The fact is, exercise selection is always an
important thing that we need to consider when we're putting together our workouts,
but we want to get the most out of your arm training the science of the selection is going to
matter a lot. And that brings us to reason, number three, why your arms aren't growing right now and
that is your idea of overload is one dimensional. And what I mean by that is if you think the best
way to continue to build bigger and bigger arms is to simply get stronger and stronger or add
more weight to the exercises that you're doing, you're likely to become very frustrated very
quickly. Because arm exercises don't just have that high capacity for simply adding weight.
Think about it, when s the last time that you're standing dumbbell curl increase by more than,
let's say, five pounds? See, if you've been lifting for any length of time, you probably
haven't increased your curl weight in a very long time either. Because you just don't have
the capacity to continue to add five or 10 pounds, because that's like adding 15 or 20% to the lift.
The fact is, guys, when you're trying to build bigger arms, you have to look elsewhere for
overload and for that techniques come in. And we're talking about things like run the rack,
simply taking the dumbbell, performing a set to failure, drop it down five pounds,
performing another set to failure, dropping another five pounds. The idea here is training
to end through failure to up the intensity without necessarily having to have a stronger lift.
The next thing we can do is something like kill switch, where we take
two exercises that are antagonistic to each other, the triceps in the biceps, in this case,
we go back and forth with an arbitrary failure number, or we call it an extinction number. So
set the number at, let's say, five reps, take your 12 rep max on the exercise and simply go back and
forth with no rest in between exercises until one of the two exercises hits the kill switch number.
We have other things too, where we could take advantage of mechanical drop sets like I did
in our Sore in 6 bicep series where I know that I may go to failure on an incline dumbbell curl.
But that doesn't stop me from being able to do additional reps at the same weight by simply
sitting up because I'm in a mechanically more efficient position to continue to do our reps.
Or simply to lean forward at that part and do a drag curl even when I've reached failure on the
second exercise. So again, taking an exercise to and through failure allows for me to up
the intensity level to get more gains without having to even change the weight in my hands.
And of course, you can take the concept from the last point and overlap strength curves.
Realizing again that abandoned curl is going to give us the most resistance at the top of the
curl, and a regular dumbbell curl, as we covered, is going to give you the most resistance in the
middle of the curl. You simply combine the two together, and now you've got a more steady,
increased resistance from the middle all the way through to the end of the exercise
to provide a novel stimulus that's capable of giving you the growth that you're after.
And that brings me to the fourth big mistake that people make when they're trying to build bigger
arms and it's how are you actually moving the weight when you're doing the exercises
that you're doing? Are you doing just that, just simply moving the weight through space?
Or are you contracting the weight through space, contracting it up and contracting it down? Do me
a favor, try this. Stand with your arms at your side here and just simply pull your arms up. In
other words, bend your elbow. That's just moving your arm in space. Of course, your bicep contracts
to get you into that position, but I want you to contract your bicep into that position.
Flex it as if someone just told you to make a muscle and you have to make the hardest muscle you
ever did. Now do that with a weight in your hand. If you don't have that intention in mind, when
you're curling that weight up, you are just sort of lazily moving that way up through space.
Yeah, there's some added resistance there because of the dumbbell, but you're not
forcefully putting in as hard of a contraction as you could, and you can do that even with
light weights. The intention is everything. The same thing can happen here with a push down,
do I just move this through space like this up and down? Or do I contract it as hard as
I possibly can through every single inch of that push down? Really trying to create the intention
that takes an exercise from being just an exercise to an incredibly effective one at that.
And of course, while that technique is best utilized with lighter weight,
so you can actually feel that focused contraction. The big mistake you also might be making here is
not using heavy enough weights also. You see, you don't do one or the other, you do both. And
when it comes to doing exercises like a curl, you need to make sure that sometimes you're mixing in
some heavier weights. Even in the three to five or six or seven rep range is going to be good for
stimulating growth, particularly if you haven't done any real repetitions of that range because
you've always been told 10 to 12 or even some higher reps are better for arm growth. That s not
true. You need to do everything, guys. And we're talking about even selecting some heavy exercises
and utilizing some cheats like my favorite exercise, the cheat curl. And even the momentum
here is not meant to necessarily make the exercise easy. It's actually putting me in position
to do another eccentrically overloaded repetition, which we know is a great driver of growth.
You can still do another classic exercise to the line tricep extension with more weight as
well. But just simply employ a little bit of that extra stretch to maybe get the LAT
just a little bit involved or engaged to help to drive the momentum to put yourself
in position for yet another eccentrically overloaded rep. We can drive more muscle
growth if we're willing to grow our horizons of how we approach our training and sticking
to just light or sticking even to just heavy is not going to do it, you've got to do both.
And of course, as always, guys, I said in the beginning, you just need to add the direct arm
work in. It doesn't have to overtake your entire training schedule, you just need to get it in.
As a matter of fact, I ll show you how you can do this in just six minutes if you want to work
on a bicep or tricep workout. I'll link my Sore in 6 minute workouts right for you here. If
you're looking for a complete program where we actually work, direct arm work into everything
we do at the right time, you can find them over at athleanx.com. If you find the video helpful,
make sure you leave your comments or thumbs up below. Click Subscribe,
turn on your Notifications so you never miss new video when we put one out. See you soon, guys.