Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1417: How to Get Stubborn Arms to Grow

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin detail how to get the biceps and triceps to grow.  If you build the muscles in your arms, they will come. (3:32) Why it’s easier for bigger muscles to take over movements. (5:56) The misunderstanding of the muscles of the arms. (8:10) How to Get Stubborn Arms to Grow. #1 – Pay attention to your elbow positioning. (9:42) #2 – Focus on the stretch and squeeze. (17:56) #3 – Train them more frequently. (27:22) #4 – Don’t forget compound exercises. (32:35) Mind Pump’s Top 10 Exercises for biceps and triceps. (40:10) Related Links/Products Mentioned November Promotion: MAPS Ultimate At-Home Workout Bundle for Only $99.99 Visit ChiliPad for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! How to Get Big Arms | Mind Pump Media The ONLY Way You Should Be Doing Dumbbell Bicep Curls! - Mind Pump TV Build Your Triceps with Angles – Mind Pump TV Build Your Biceps with Angles – Mind Pump TV Importance Of The Eccentric Phase Of An Exercise – Mind Pump Podcast Mind Pump TV - YouTube Why Won’t My Arms Grow? - Mind Pump Blog Top Exercises You Should Do If You Want Big Arms – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump’s Occlusion Training Guide How To Use BFR Training To GROW Your Arms (CRAZY PUMP!) Get BIG Biceps By Doing Chin-Ups! (SECRET WEAPON) - Mind Pump TV Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources

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 8 minutes and give yourself a little bit of an arm pump. Try this a couple of times a day on the days off in between. Watch what happens to your arms. It's crazy.

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind, pop, mind, pop with your hosts. Salta Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You are listening to Mind Pump World's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. Now in this episode, we talk all about how to get stubborn arms to build muscle. If you're somebody who struggles with your arm development, if you work out and the rest of your body seems to respond,

but your arms just don't seem to respond at all to your workouts or if you just want to get things moving faster, if you're interested in getting your arms to improve faster than they currently are, listen to today's episode. We give you a lot of very effective tips that we found through training, lots and lots of people over two decades that are extremely effective. Now this particular podcast is also brought to you by our sponsor, Chilly. Now Chilly makes some incredible sleep aid products. One of them is a weighted blanket

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and Maps Hit, all of them. The retail is normally $291. You can get all of them for $99.99 cents. Just go to maps november.com. That's the word maps M-A-P-S november.com. Our number one, it may be correct me if I'm wrong at them, 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. Yeah. Everybody wants a heart to compete with. I think it goes butt abs arms, that's what it goes.

Okay. So, that's it, everybody. Build your perfect man. Yeah. But abs arm. But it's definitely a popular one. It's one I get comments on all the time. Well, I think it's got one in fact yesterday.

I also find that it attracts both sexes. Like so, sometimes you think the title I think is not ideal, 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 words like,

I want to get big arms. You're tone and defiant. Right, big arms. Exactly, I want to get big arm tone and define my arms exactly I want you know, I want Michelle Obama arms or you get you get statements like that But they're wanting to which essentially build their arms like you wouldn't use the term big So so but when you look actually at the analytics of of the guide It's it's a pretty even split of both male and female that are downloading it So I got the message from it was a it was a female in listener and she said she downloaded

the big armed skyd 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 you're saying is developing your arms and if they're not, insert whatever word, building, sculpting, shaping, toning. By the way, those are 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, it's 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 it, do 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.

You know, when you do exercises that are for small muscle groups, right? 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.

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 gonna 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 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 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 and 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 the sort of hardwired patterns of being able to move the weight. And I'd have to check them and 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 what they've done before that was just, I need to move this weight from here up to here and really not considering what needs to transpire and where I need to feel that specifically. Yeah, and there's also a misconception around exercises and angles and a misunderstanding of the muscles of the arm to begin with. Like for example, the bicep, 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 is 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, you know, 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 arm. Well, you just mentioned one of our four points that we're gonna talk about, and I'm glad that you listed it first because this was the biggest one for me. So, forever, I was a young kid going to the gym. You get, and I'm sure you guys could,

we're just like this, right? A new machine in the gym, like you've never tried out, you wanna 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 and relation to how it works the tricep and how it works the bicep and how important that was to stimulate more growth.

And so I found myself doing what I thought were different really exercises, but my bicep didn't recognize it as really different. You know, so what I mean by that is, if you stand in front of a cable, right, and you do a basic tricep push down. 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're doing that with a straight bar, a triangle, a reverse grip, a rope, and all those things is the same movement. Yes. And the tricep recognizes that way. So even though I thought I was being smart and you know, changing it up, you know, every other week or every few weeks by changing the tool that I was holding, my bicep or my tricep had already become very adapted to that movement. And I already saw most the gains I was going to 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 and 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 difference.

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. So 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 the most of the resistance is happening? Or is it at the bottom? In the case of a bicep, for example, a preacher curl, right? Or my elbows are over a bench. The weight is gonna be heavier,

or it's gonna feel heavier at the bottom, because that's where I'm directly opposing gravity. At the top of a preacher curl, it's much easier. Well, your elbow, you gotta explain that. Your elbow is positioned underneath the weight, which is then positioned on the pad, which is supporting a lot of the... 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 gonna 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, we're gonna 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 gonna 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, 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. Right. 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 trisop 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 on front of me, and then I want to do the elbow position down by my side. Yes. So an example, that would be a trisop push down, 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 when 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 a incline curl where my elbows are behind my body. I could do a incline curl or 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 your because here's a deal, most workouts for arms will have more than one exercise, right? Very, very rarely we 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 into a smaller degree hand positioning for bicep. Right, so to that point, I was going to say, if you're somebody who's following in a case 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. Now, the way that they explain this back in the day, because 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 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. That's the mistake that I was using. Yes, forever I just assumed because I was using a different tool, I was using a dumbbell than 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 same thing goes for machines. A lot of time, 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 color 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 like getting that full range of motion. And what, you know, those different positions actually provide like 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 thing 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 the 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 will, 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, I curl, and then I alternate it. Oh my God, that just kills. I remember doing that, you know, 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. And, you know, so after I looked

at him, I'm like, this is great because you actually listed this in the order that I piece it together as a kid. No, seriously, like the very first introduction and then you started. 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 said in my arms responded. The next thing was the range of motion in the stretch position because, you know, and

maybe this is more of a guy thing, right? Like, I tend to see the cheat curls because you want to be able to sick. I can curl in the 25. How much are you doing? Yeah, now I'm curling the wheels. You don't say, 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 lightning 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 didn't. And even the squeeze, you know, 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. 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, you, the hard part, right, the positive, like 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 opposite for the, or the exact same example that for the tricep would be doing a cable tricep push down, and you push, you focus on pushing down on the exercise, and then you let the cable swing 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 like, sort of back to the first point, but being able to maintain like a nice upright posture through the entire time and not like hunching over, especially doing like a tricep extension,

I see this all the time, even if they're using cables, like there's guys where 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 with the squeezes crazy and excuse me with a stretch is crazy and then exercise with the squeezes crazy, and excuse me, with a stretch is crazy, and then exercise with a squeezes 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's certain exercises that lend themselves well to have like a little bit of body English or where form isn't like as as crucial. When you're doing an isolation exercise, right, we're trying to isolate, 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, help it. We're 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 school crusher and use momentum or let you like

Justin was using the example of like cable push downs where people 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. It's such, there's 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? You know, 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 you. You don't see that a lot, by the way.

No, you don't. These days, people who cheat curl either 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 like 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 good for or excellent form, squeeze and stretch with control is superior 99% of time. One percent of time you wanna overload with a heavy cheek curl. Still, pay attention to the negative. Don't let the weight just fall.

Otherwise you're kinda, 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, bio mechanics. Understand what we're trying to accomplish. To take advantage of advanced exercise 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 know, I've never had any clients. Yeah, I can count on one hand. How many times I, 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, 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 apps, 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 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 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 is, 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. And 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 each 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's just trained arms before or trained them to failure, as experienced this, like, there comes a point where that muscle gets so fatigued that you're just, 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 I had an arm 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 a majority of the movement was no longer the bicep or the tricep

that all the other muscles were starting to cheat. So just simply spreading it out over the week gets all the benefits that you're talking about. 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 ones. So I feel like it's kind of too prone. 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, you know, 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 workouts I was doing with the team,

just because I was waiting for guys to get rehab. And so I'm in this training facility anyways with a getting rehab, there's bands there I'm kind of waiting in 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 ball, 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 and 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 a 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 in there is doing things like BFR. And 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. I knew this for my back like rows and pull ups did a better job at building my back than you know 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, for triceps, I knew there were some compound movements like dips in close grip bench best.

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 curl. 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 it 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 my muscles. That's about the ultimate version of full range of motion. Oh yeah. 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, when I found later though too, it's not about always like how many reps I could get, I could actually add weight to myself now and just do few reps and get a totally different experience out of as well. Well, Sal always shares his bicep button 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 that, like 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 everything would work out.

I did the same thing. Yeah, and I started every back workout like that for, I did this for like six months, and the goal was eventually, I could 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 it lead 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. And then you get more elbow flexion and 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 gonna be able to load a straight bar curl that heavy. Even someone who's really, really strong is what may be 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 a pull-up, same thing goes for an enclosed bench press. I might be able to skull crush a hundred and something pounds, but I could do an enclosed bench press. I might be able to skull crash 100 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 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 four reps sets, bicep curls or a tricep press down. It's just gonna be, it's gonna 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 how you do, by the way, the chin up for biceps. Because any chin up is gonna 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 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 work on? Okay, so from the functional world, you guys have your like Arnold cheat curls, and like I've not, I don't identify with that, but what 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 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 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, are you holding yourself at the top? Yeah. So much tangent involved. It's insane. Right, there's not a lot of tricep or bicep exercise that I can think of that is, because it's loading your body weight. It's forcing you.

Right, and you have to, in the bottom of it, you're not rested. 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, 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 biceps. 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 reps, strength training for my arms, and then I can move to the isolation stuff where I'm focusing on 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 ranges of motion. Train your arms two to four days a week with hard workouts. Throw in 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,'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 get in 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. It 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 breakie out. 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 maps, fitness, products.com. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy,

and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballac, maps for performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos, the RGB Super Bundle is like having Sal and I'm in Justin as your own personal trainer's butt at a fraction of the price. The RGB Super Bundle has a full 30-day money bag guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at MindPumpMedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review

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