The muscles in your arms are no different from the muscles in the rest of your body, which means they should follow the same principle. You must overload your muscle fibers to the point that they break down, then give them sufficient rest for them to rebuild and get stronger. To develop the biggest muscles possible, stay within a range of 10 to 12 repetitions. In addition to training correctly for maximum hypertrophy, you must ensure that you consume enough calories to fuel your body in an effort to develop bigger muscles.
Instructions
1. Train your arms last. Focus on doing compound exercises first. Compound exercises use bigger muscle groups. Jeff Anderson of the website criticalbench.com explains it this way, "compound exercises move the body through more than one joint movement, while isolation exercises only move the body through a single-joint movement." Barbell squats, pull-ups and push-ups are good examples. Bicep curls and tricep extensions are isolation exercises.
2. Do more compound exercises than isolation exercises. According to Anderson, "compound exercises, due to the increased amount of muscle used for the movements, are better at sending your endocrine system a "distress call" to pump out more anabolic hormones such as testosterone and growth hormone." The more muscle fiber you can stimulate, the bigger the muscle you will build. Two thirds of your workout should involve compound, one third isolation.
3. Train your triceps as much as you train your biceps. Focusing on your bicep is wrong since the triceps are a bigger muscle group. In other words, favor the triceps, if any.
4. Switch hand positions in all exercises. Keeping your muscles guessing will trigger them to get bigger. Since you do only extensions for triceps isolations and flexions for bicep isolations, use the following three hand positions--palms up, palms down and palms facing each other.
5. Vary your weight. Even though you want to focus on lifting heavy and use a low rep range, lightening the weight and doing higher reps (15-20) once every couple of weeks will stimulate more muscle growth. You can avoid plateauing by incorporating this principle into your program.
Tags: bigger muscle, isolation exercises, body through, compound exercises, compound exercises, more muscle, move body