Small arms can often be a major source of frustration, and in some cases, embarrassment for many men. It’s a regular problem for naturally skinny guys who just want to pack on some size and look bigger in a t-shirt. Small arms also tend to lead to poor symmetry, proportions and other aesthetically un-pleasing results.
I have discovered quite a few tricks you can perform to bring up your weak points if they are frustrating you. I will share with you what I performed last year in order to bring my lagging arms up, and you can definitely do this too:
1. Write Down Your Goal
This goal is so important as it gives you some direction, motivation, and it keeps you accountable for success (or lack of). For example, if currently your arms are 14 inches and you want 16 inch arms as quickly as possible, then set this down as a goal. You must measure your progress every single week to ensure that you’re staying on track.
I found weekly progress updates to be very motivating. When I saw measurable improvements in my arm size, it made me hungrier for more growth and this meant that I trained harder in the gym. The same will apply to you. You can achieve massive arm growth provided you are motivated, and that you specialise.
2. Specialisation
You will need to back off on other body parts at least to some degree. It’s no use going into the gym and blasting your entire body every session. Remember that the goal here is to achieve rapid arm growth. If you hit fifteen sets of squats and deadlift every week, it’s going to be nearly impossible to do this for a recovery standpoint.
Continue training everything else, however, reduce the number of sets per week. For example, for squats, deadlifts, and any other exercises that aren’t going to directly target your arms, only perform 5-8 sets per week. Personally, I found that 5-8 sets was the sweet spot for maintaining size in all the other areas, without impacting my recovery from arm workouts.
3. Arm Training
For the actual arm training itself, I found that 10-20 sets per week per muscle was fantastic for getting them to beef up. This is 10-20 sets of biceps AND 10-20 sets of triceps. The reason this margin is wide, is because when I first started arm specialisation, I grew off ten sets. Over time, I needed more and more volume. Once I pushed beyond twenty sets per week, I regressed due to lack of recovery.
Therefore, I would suggest starting off with 10-12 sets per week, keeping in mind that you will need to increase this over time. I used two exercises for biceps and two exercises for triceps. Hammer curls, barbell curls, lying skull-crushers and close-grip bench-press. These worked excellently for me, and they will for you too. I don’t believe we need endless variations in order to grow arms, just one or two per muscle. As long as total workload is sufficient, your arms will explode.
4. Frequency
Last year when I was playing around with this stuff, I was doing a lot of reading on Bodybuilding forums, T Nation, and other places like that. There was a lot of confusion on frequency. Some guys said two times per week was optimal, some said every day. I can tell you from my results (as a natural), that neither is ideal for maximum growth. My arms grew the fastest, training them 3-4 times per week. I suggest you do the same.
Obviously, split your 10-20 sets evenly across the week. So if you’re doing twelve sets per muscle across four sessions, this would mean three sets every session for biceps, and three sets for triceps too. I found that 3-4 times per week was ideal as it still allowed for recovery session to session. This became increasingly important over time, as I started to get closer to the twenty set threshold.
5. Food
Honestly, this is probably the most important of all. Assuming you do actually go to the gym and train hard, food will determine the majority of your results. You just aren’t going to get bigger arms if you’re not eating enough, specifically, a calorie surplus. You must eat enough to gain weight.
If your goal is to increase your arms from 14 inches to 16 inches, you will need to eat a lot more food than you currently are. Sure, you may gain a little bit of fat, but you can always cut this down later. For now, calculate your maintenance calories, increase this number by 10%, and set this as your daily calorie goal.
This means that if your maintenance calories are currently 2500, you need to eat 2750 calories. Make sure you measure this every day, as it’s responsible for at least 50% of your results. Also remember that this 2750 figure will need to increase slowly over time. Very important.
Summary
Carry out the above five steps in that order and you will grow your arms significantly. Always remember that you must stay consistent with your training and food tracking, and hard work always pays off eventually. Good luck.
Read More: The Ultimate Guide To Building Muscle: Genetics And Training
At first i thought this was written by Alex Jones from InfoWars and i laughed at the thought of that. Good insightful piece with solid detail. Thumbs up.
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Let’s make the frogs straight again!!
Hah! Was just thinking of that (infamous) clip:
He’s breaking the conditioning!
*Writes an article on building massive guns
*Shows an image where guns are holstered (albeit by lovely tanned hide).
Bet something of his was getting massive… and not his guns.
Steroids. There, I saved you reading this drivel.
I prefer my gonads the way they look now.
Gym junkies are all looks and no go – Lift for two hours, order six inch plain chicken sub, go home and wank. It’s no wonder that surfers and manual labourers, guys that work their bodies the right way, always towel these show ponies up in clubs/pubs etc.
Exactly what I’ve been thinking! They’re all look massive and strong for sure. But their strength is not really practical. Poor speed. Poor flexibility. They can’t even scratch their own back, ffs.
But yeah, they can lift and break things no doubt. Good for them if that’s what they’re aiming for…?
If you want to look like an inconsistently-employed ‘Bouncer’ be sure to spend all your time on ‘bicep tits’.
Note-
Women HATE men who are in shape because it implies they have to match a certain fitness level!
The Program for Maximum Gains:
1. Deadlift 225 x 4 reps – Twice per Week
2. Inject yourself with Sus250 and Tren until your nuts fall off.
3. Congratulations, you are a GymCel.
4. Enjoy your new life of homosexuality.
The USA is now a bankrupt warmongering police state. The elites control the government, media, and the corporations.
Americans either are ignoring the decay of the US or think that nothing can be done to stop the collapse.
We sit at our keyboards and scream at our computers, but feel powerless to do anything about the decline. The struggle is immense and too much damage has been done to save the US.
Even if we spent a year to fight to repeal mandatory helmet laws, new nanny state laws banning vaping, smoking, and hoverboards would be enacted.
What can you do?
We could protest and be arrested or killed.
We could use our guns and be killed.
We have the goddamn NSA wiretapping our phones, listening to our words, reading our emails, and recording our web history. The NSA has our pictures, knows our address, Social Security numbers, phone numbers, purchases, current location, plans, doctors, lawyers, and what we had for dinner yesterday.
There really is no hope.
The best we can do now is to just prepare, dropout, don’t comply, don’t consent, don’t participate, don’t vote, don’t buy licenses, don’t pay taxes, don’t call the police, don’t deal with the government, stop supporting this rigged system, and spread the word.
good show man. if only people were really awake to the reality atvthe level you are…i agree, things are so amazingly shitty u dont understand how alleged men cant see it, can acknowledge it all they want is the nasty once a month bleeding tuna taco and ego salve and everything will be just fine…kumbayfuckingya. and then they wonder why they adrift and frustrated because they have no meaning in their lives…..shit..
Denizens of hell, are you woke the fuck up yet for fucks sake?
Hey “Free Speech Forum”, you might want to stop reading all the stuff that is feeding your fear for a month or two so you can calm down, and start thinking clearly again.
The BEST we can do now is by DOING ANYTHING WE DAMN WELL PLEASE.
So what if women don’t like it on their talk shows, and facebook groups.
They can’t stop men from being men, unless men go beta and agree with them.
The danger isn’t the government, per se, it is the hordes of beta men who WANT women to tell them what to do – because there isn’t a clear alpha man to follow.
And your philosophy of hiding and giving up isn’t a step in the right direction.
FREE SPEECH
You can leave. I did. My circumstances in Detroit as a young man and then as an internal migrant in Phoenix were so awful that I simply bolted and have not set foot on US soil in decades.
Nobody follows me. I have no credit card problems in the United States. I watch BBC although all media are the same, more or less. The last reality show I saw was cops.
Older expats drop the real truth bombs.
Baby boomers and gen x mem lost their asses to impossible to please wives and bosses. In the last ten years however, a large amount of guys have started their own business, and have chosen the hook up culture. Those are the only two ways to stay here and win. Start your own business, and trust no woman.
DAVID
MAJOR TRUTH BOMB
The 1% who plays SJW to bank money will fuck off from the West Coast to NZ without a care in the world, leaving idiot jungle Indians and their Mestizo overlords to scuff in the streets shouting “Mi loco barrio Ese.!” This happened in Detroit and when the Hood Rats were simply sitting in the road scratching the head in befuddlement at the fact that even Jews who shouted for civil rights shut down their pawn shops and liquor stores and left the local populace penniless without any tax money.
The white males who can most easily leave usually have the money in the banks. Think it bothers them to sip wine in New Zealand and never see another Hood Rat high on crack.
The GREATEST PUNISHMENT white men can inflict is to walk away. This is what happened in South Africa.
This is sadly, the worst punishment for the working-class whites like it was for the Boers.
More millions and the most able-bodied white men will decide to leave Los Angeles to jungle Indians and move their shit to NZ lock, stock and barrel.
Minorities and women and white trash townies do not realize-because they are stupid-how easy it is for the wealthy males to simply move to some other British settlement where a passport can be bought for a cool million.
I was born in 1974 and managed to take my diploma from Central Michigan overseas when it was still worth shit where I wracked up some qualification.
Gee, I missed a lot since the fucking Clinton era. I can remember the year 2000 in Dubai when we looked forward to a great Millennium and then George Bush got the dumb Evangelicals to vote for him by saying he had found religion and he flushed America straight into the toilet. To what extent it was stabilized by an African race hustler who haunted gay Chicago bath clubs in his youth taking Moneyed white fag cocks up his ass for cocaine is debatable. What isn’t is the situation of people born in 1996 or so.
I’ve seen all of this overseas and I do not give a shit.
COPS was the only reality television show besides MTV in 1998 and certainly nobody admired its participants.
The fact that screaming Armenian whores whose Dad may have aided and abbetted a coked-out Negro in wasting a Jew Gigolo-loving ex-white trash wife in an alley way become idols is a far cry from the middle of finger of Gen X shows like X-FIles.
1990’s nostalgia is actually quite overwhelming and that is why American Crime Story is so popular-we miss the days when fags did so much meth that they went on cross-country murder sprees looking for some mobbed-up fashion designer they thought gave them the dick pathogens.
Just leave your Western country. I did and I’m 100x more happier compare living in such a mess up country which only gets worst every year.
If the Right draws arms against the Left, I’ll be catching the next plane back to fight for the country I love!
It’s my dream to kill a shit load of Feminists and Soy boys!!
This article has some reasonable advice which would probably work for an intermediate trainee, although I would add 1 very important point – if you are a rank newbie DO NOT focus on building your arms. Ignore the advice in this article. First spend between 2 and 24 months (depending on age, beginning strength levels, previous activity, injury history, bodyweight etc) to build AT LEAST a 200/300/400lb bench/squat/deadlift or comparable lifts (eg. Trap bar deadlift can be put in place of deadlifts or squats (sometimes both) if injury history or particularly bad biomechanics preclude their use). There are lots of reasonable programs which will get you there (and potentially much further) such as Starting Strenght (Mark Rippetoe), Stronglifts 5 x 5, Brawn / Beyond Brawn (Stuart McRobert – probably the best book ever written on weight training for newbies).
Once you have done this, you will already have put a fair bit of size on your arms (and everywhere else) as well as having learned proper technique, how your body responds to intensity, volume and frequency and how to eat. THEN you can change your focus to intermediate goals such as arm specialisation, 1RM specialisation, power development etc. If you try the approach in this article when you are still curling 20lb Dumbbells and benching 135lb not only will you not gain size on your arms, you won’t gain anywhere else or progress your strength properly either.
Australian Irishman,
Everything you just said is the truth. Particularly stronglifts 5×5. I’ve been doing it for three years and I’m up to 315/350/450 (bench, squat, deadlift). That’s the way to go.
I stand by the strongman’s 5×5 as well. But if one doesn’t pace himself correctly or start off on the correct weight, it will cause injury like it did to me. Been in chiro and pt for the last several years. But I still life in my program.
I would suggest you look into Wendler 5/3/1, the Texas Method, and also read Marty Gallagher’s The Purposeful Primitive.
I’m not suggesting the programs you mentioned are bad, just pointing out a few more.
Who the fuck down votes this?
5/3/1 will build muscle and strength on even the skinniest broomstick.
Anyone here get weekly growth when measuring with tape and lifting?
Eat more protein, like 1 g per day per lb of body weight.. Also, lower the weights to the 5-8 reps per set to muscle failure, app. 3 or 4 sets per exercise, and make sure to throw in a couple negative reps at the end. You will see weekly growth.
Thanks, Vader.
What good are huge arms in the Zone? An emission could hit any minute, and then it is just up to you, your AK, and your vodka staff. Good luck.
We should start to post our arms here on ROK. let the weaklings feel shame for not lifting. Nice article. I’m going to take your advice and we’ll see how it works in a couple of months. I’ll post my arms.
Don Funez,
I’ll post my small arms here now.
My forearms are 11 inches, and my biceps are 12 1/2.
Started Strong Lifts and make slow progress – then invariably get sick or busy at work or whatever, and lose progress.
I think a healthy amount of shame is motivating.
Samuel
enjoyed the article but the photo with the face masked out looks terrible. C’mon there must be some muscle dude ROK can find who doesn’t care if some harpy feminist sees his face while he does a one arm pushup.
My message to the guy in the photo (who I am concluding didn’t want his face shown): grow a set.
I notice YOUR photo is conspicuously absent. It’s not some feminist harpy we’re worried about, it’s the feminist harpy from HR at our company who spends all day trawling comments on sites like RoK, just itching to give some red-pill coworker the DCM (Don’t Come Monday). It has happened, and will happen again.
This article seems to suggest that full body training is normal although it does not encourage it. Full body training is not an option for serious bodybuilders IMHO. Far too much work in far too little time and no way you can have the energy to work everything properly in that way unless you only want to look like a guy who works out instead of a detailed beast.
Another thing; the article mentions biceps and triceps but not much else. Your upper arm actually has two arm flexors in it that can be emphasized separately: the brachialis and the biceps. Your lower arm (forearm) has three distinct forearm muscles that can be targeted separately.
The triceps are made up of three heads and all movements are not equal when it comes to working the different heads; some movements will leave you sore in a completely different part of your tricep. I never experience any appreciable soreness from pressing but tricep extensions and kickbacks cause a lot of soreness for me as they actually stretch the tricep much better.
It’s good to do multiple movements to make sure the muscle is being hit from all angles and stretched in different ways. Don’t focus on turning yourself into a human crane who can bench press (the bench does not work all tricep heads equally) 1000 pounds for two inches off your chest but learn to work your muscle to the bone instead and get stronger in a lot of exercises.
You can make a lot of progress sticking to the basics but if you split your routine from the start there’s no reason not to do a lot of isolation work from the start. A lot of people claim you should cover the basics first but there’s no science behind the idea that you should not isolate and work all your muscles properly from the start. Think about it in terms of game and dating; let’s say you have a job, can dress and are in decent shape but looked closely your shoes are worn out, your teeth are yellow from smoking and you comb your hair funny to hide a bald spot instead of getting a better haircut or shaving. You can hide those flaws but why not start working on them from day one like you did with everything else?
Again I must emphasize that if you’re a general fitness guy who’s doing muay thai and hip hop dancing multiple days a week, I can appreciate you not wanting to get serious about bodybuilding but if bodybuilding is your only sport, there’s no need to go down the bench/deadlift/squat simplified routine because you’re not a powerlifter trying to turn himself into a human crane who moves the bar a couple inches with maximum leverage. You’re on your way to becoming an adonis and there’s no magic in lifts that can herniate your lumbar spine to hell from a BB standpoint. Do a lot of stuff but play safe and get stronger without using body english and leverage; bodybuilding is not BJJ or judo where you try to overcome weight and mass with trickery. Accept just how relatively weak you are right now and do the small weights with perfect form and neutral back. If you start swinging from the start and adding too much weight, you’ll get frustated down the line because sooner or later even the swinging won’t be enough. The less weight you can get away with adding, the better. Your development will be slow but consistent and the tiny increments will really add up in a year.
My arms are finally growing this year after five years of spinning my wheels. What changed?
Squats
Tricep pulldowns
Dumbell Shoulder press
I think squats boost testosterone and human growth hormone from what i read. I also think my triceps grow faster than my biceps, and shoulder press adds a nice cap to the top, although it might take a year to see the difference. Those muscles grow slowly for me compared to other muscle groups. Fuck genetics.
Might not be so much genetics, as it is just basic anatomy, and the natural homeostasis our bodies seek (symmetry).
BI-ceps have two muscle groups…TRI-ceps have three. So it’s going to be easier to get larger working three groups over two.
You are correct, that working the lower body will sort of prompt your body to seek symmetry and your upper body may sort of try to ‘catch up’…ie – return to homeostasis (symmetry).
I’m no expert, but I read that squats do increase free T, but only for like the half hour or hour during and after a workout.
As a side note, the shoulder muscles are the most responsive to androgenic activities in the body. They will respond faster than most other muscle groups.
In any case, congrats on the gains and busting through the plateau. Five years is a long one.
Articles like this are wrong on so many levels. Your body is your tool. If you work for your tool then you obviously don’t understand too much. Use the tool for greater purposes, you will get the strenght you’re looking for and also complete certain spiritualemotionalintellectual journeys that should concern you more. I’m going to give you a very simple example: dancing.
Uh, shut the fuck up.
Go away, kid, I’m speaking to men.
They’re putting chemicals in the water that turn the freakin’ frogs GAY!
Who downvoted this? Some gay frog who’s in denial?
Train both your bis and tris on the same day. Incorporate compound sets into your routine as well (do a tricep exercise immediately after a bicep exercise). When I first started doing those two things, my arms grew so fast that I had new stretchmarks on my arms pretty much every month.
Good stuff, Alex.
As a 61 year old whose gym-time is closing in on 40 years worth, let me add this – as you get older, your recovery time gets longer. I now lift no more frequently than every third day.
I work each bodypart every four days; and I work each part to death.
Dumb reply, unless you are 60+ like Dan.
Big arms are great but real strength comes from your legs and your back.
Dem glutes, yo.
Not true. The middle section of your body is the most important:abs, back and pelvis.
The chicks aren’t checking out your legs and back.
The biggest compliments I’ve received some chicks have concerned my legs actually and that’s before I even learned how to lift properly.
I’m not an expert by any stretch, but does it make sense smashing bi’s/tri’s without also focusing on delts? Otherwise you could end up looking a skinny bastard with big guns.
Try and find a “Shake-Weight”. No joke it will get you guns a long with Muscle Milk. Use it like a jump rope.