#010 Building Big Arms and a 6-Pack

Today’s read: 840 Words (4 min.)

Welcome to the Boats & Logs Lifting Club - and welcome back to all loyal members! I truly appreciate your strong support and how quickly we could form a fast-growing community that understands that building muscle is not rocket science. It only takes intense workouts, a good diet, and proper sleep.

Over the last few weeks, we have covered the best strategies to train Chest, Back, Legs, and Shoulders. Today, we finish the series with a breakdown of how to train arms and abs. Both of them are very visually appealing and something we all strive for.

Training Arms

A simplified way of looking at the anatomy of our arms is by splitting it into the front of our arms (biceps) and the back of our arms (triceps). And while the triceps is the bigger part of our arms and crucial to look big, everybody wants a big biceps, so that’s why we are starting with the biceps.

The biceps is split into two heads, but if you are not planning to compete, you shouldn’t worry about the different heads and just see it as one muscle. A muscle you should keep in mind is the Brachialis. While it is not really visible, training the Brachialis has the upside that it will push out the biceps and make it seem bigger.

Whether it’s pull-downs, rows, or pull-ups, the biceps already gets a lot of work from all kinds of pull exercises. Therefore, for your first years of training, you don’t even need to isolate the muscle to grow a big biceps. However, adding a few sets (6 or more per week) of an isolation exercise (e.g. Cable Curls) will increase your muscle growth.

There aren’t many different ways to isolate the biceps. You can either do a curl variation or a biceps-focused pull-up variation. To little surprise, doing concentration curls reaches the highest amount of muscle activation, so if you want to maximize muscle growth, it’s best to choose concentration curls. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter much which curl variation you choose, and you should go with what feels best to you.

But one thing to keep in mind if you are choosing another exercise than concentration curls is that you should really move the weight with your biceps and cheat as little as possible with the back and raising the elbow.

The triceps make the biggest part of your arms and you can’t neglect training the triceps if you want to have big arms. While the biceps is being trained by pull movements, the triceps is trained by push movements. Therefore, isolation exercises aren’t needed to build a big triceps, but they will make the triceps grow quicker and also make you stronger for push movements, which has positive effects on growing the chest and shoulder.

To make sure you are hitting all heads of the triceps, make sure to split your tricep work in exercises that are close presses (e.g., triangle push-up or close grip benchpress), push-downs (e.g., cable pushdowns) and overhead pushes (e.g., overhead extensions).

Training Abs

Let’s be honest, you are not caring much about the anatomy of the abs and why these muscles are important. You want to know how to achieve a six-pack. The important muscle we need to train for a six-pack is the Rectus Abdominis.

Good news for everybody who hates 15-minute abs burner videos: You don’t need these workouts to build abs. I don’t know why people believe they need to train the abs differently to let’s say, the chest, but most videos you will find are some kind of 10-15-minute abs routine. But abs are similar to every other muscle of your body and don’t require 15 minutes of continuous tension. Simply do 10-15 sets to failure per week, and you are fine.

Broken down into 3 days per week, that’s only 3-5 sets per day. Something you can easily implement at the end of your workout. Regarding exercise selection, we have many different choices. Luckily, abs can be trained well with our body weight. I like doing crunch variations as well as variations of hanging leg raises.

But don’t forget: Abs are made in the kitchen. You need to be lean (around 12% body fat) for your abs to pop. If your body fat is too high, your abs will be (barely) visible. On the upside, seeing your abs for the first time can also be an additional motivation during a cut.

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Boats & Logs

Disclaimer

This is not Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. Before starting any workout program, diet plan, or supplement protocol, please consult a medical professional. These are the opinions from an AI voice.