The Home Arm Training For Perfectionists
Do you have an entire day to devote to your arm training? Then these exercises are the ones you should do!
Two Compounds To Start With
I love doing a good compound exercise, so we get this train rolling with exercises that involve all arm muscles at varying degrees.
The opening makes the towel pull-up, which works the biceps, the back and the forearms and therefore nicely ties in with the muscles we’ll finish with.
To pick up more compound steam we move on to close-grip push-ups, which involve the chest, but you will feel that the triceps is the true target.
Isolating Biceps, Triceps And Brachialis
We start the isolating business with your upper arms, which means we need to train three muscles.
Yes, three. Everyone knows the biceps, most know the triceps, and many forget the brachialis. That’s the one sitting below your biceps and training it gives your arms the perfect fullness you want.
Doing the triceps push-ups the biceps got a bit of rest, making it the ideal candidate for the first isolation. That means doing the exercise everyone immediately recognizes: the biceps curl.
The twisting motion on the halfway gets work from the forearms. If you want the curl as a complete isolation, keep the dumbbell horizontal and in front of your thighs.
On to the triceps. No other exercise isolates it better than the kickback, but you need to do it with strict form to get something out of it. The range of motion is small and any movement from the shoulder reduces it even further.
At this point it’s time to give direct attention to the brachialis. It worked along on the previous exercises, but to get the absolute rest out of it we need an isolation. And that’s the concentration curl.
Why does this work the brachialis instead of the biceps, you ask? Well, the biceps still works along, but any exercise where the elbow is in front of the shoulder gets more work from the brachialis than the biceps.
Isolating The Forearm Muscles
The forearms look harmless enough, but they consist of tons of muscles. Which makes sense when you think about it. Your hands are capable of very many different movements and the forearms are involved in letting them do those.
We already had these involved when doing the towel pulls-ups and by now they are good and ready and rested enough to benefit from direct isolations. Luckily that only means havin to do three exercises.
And, lazy as I am, I handled them all in one video, because doing them isolated from the others doesn’t make an awful lot of sense.
When And How Often?
It should be clear that devoting an entire workout to only training your arms is only for people who have experience working out. It doesn’t make sense for beginners, who are much better advised doing a full body home workout.
Everyone else should do this workout once a week, and each exercise for three sets, staying in the 6 to 12 rep range.
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