Two Tickets To This Summer's "Gun Show"

No matter what age us gentlemen reach, our inner macho dude will always remain.  As guys, we will always enjoy things like watching sports with our buddies, laughing about immature things, and throwing insults at each other and accepting said insult as a term of endearment. Sometimes our approach to working out is no different.  Strong core?  Yeah, that's nice.  Correcting muscle imbalances?  Uh, maybe.  Positive sense of well-being?  Pssssh! C'mon, man, give me some BIG guns!!!

One of the most popular things most men ask me (especially my friends) is "how do I get big arms?" Regardless of what's fashionable, strong looking arms never seem to go out of style.  I don't encounter a lot of guys who get inspired watching anorexic-looking, pretty boy vampires and say "yeah, I want that look".  Stallone, Arnold, Hugh Jackman or the guy from Thor are better candidates for most of us men.  For me personally, my hero as a kid was Hulk Hogan.  Watching Wrestlemania III as a 7 year old and seeing Hogan body-slam Andre The Giant and then flexing his 24" pythons in celebration, was all it took for me to inspire me to start training as soon as I was old enough to hit the basement and use my dad's rusty old weight set.  

As a personal trainer I always keep up with the latest innovations in execise science and strength and conditioning knowledge. But at 32 years old and 18 1/2" arms myself, my inner Hulkamaniac still comes out when training my arms.  Even though the Hulkster is 60 and his arms are still bigger than mine.

So how do you get big arms, already? What is the one exercise I should be doing that will give my arms the size I want?  The answer is simple: The Squat.  I know, I know; just hear me out.  Oh and by the way, don't even THINK about saying that a squat is only for your legs!!!!!   Besides the obvious, squats place the greatest stress on the body's Central Nervous System (in a good way).  One of the results of placing that stress on the CNS, is your body naturally increasing your testosterone level.  More testosterone production = more muscle added.  That goes for more than just your legs.  Squat strong and your arms will reap the benefit without even training them!  If you don't squat regularly, you are wasting your time in the gym.  And stop doing barbell curls in the squat rack!!!!  The squat rack is for squats!  Deadlifts are also beneficial.

Alright, now that you are going to do more squats, lets move on to upper body.  The biggest muscles in your arms are your biceps and triceps.  Each of these muscles have multiple parts or "heads" to them.  The "Bi"-cep has two heads while obviously the "Tri"-cep has three.  Guess which one you should be using more to get bigger arms?  Multi-joint exercises will help the most since they enable more muscles and you can handle more weight.  For triceps you should be doing parallel bar dips (add weight if you can) and close grip bench presses.  If you can't handle dips, modify and do bench dips instead.    As for your biceps, Pull-ups and/or chin-ups are a must.  Use an assisted machine if necessary, but strive to improve on the real thing.  Shoulders presses shouldn't be ignored either.

As for single-joint or isolation moves for your biceps and triceps, they are interchangeable as far as I'm concerned.  Pick one or two isolation moves in addition to the multi-joint moves, stick with them for a few weeks, then change them up.  For my flavor of the month I'm doing Single Arm TRX bicep curls and incline hammer curls for bicep and TRX Tricep extensions and EZ Bar Skull-Crushers for Triceps.

Frank Francis is a personal trainer and small group fitness instructor at Fitness Together North Andover located at 73 Main Street North Andover.
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