[quote]bugeishaAD wrote:
People that think you shouldn’t do direct arm work should GTFO of the Bodybuilding section.
boo-ya-ka-sha.[/quote]
Respek.
I’ve attached a photo here, so as not to be a faceless, anonymous keyboard warrior.
They’re at 17.5 inches - I’ll leave that up to you to decide if that’s “big” and my arm program is worth listening to. When I started lifting, they looked like compression socks that had had gallons of Crisco forcefully extruded into them, so I’m pretty happy with how they’ve developed.
The cornerstone of my arm routine used to be incline, alternating dumbbell curls. Poliquin advocated these in one of his books. To be honest I always felt they were hitting my forearms and brachiali more than my biceps. Recently, I’ve emphasized chin-ups and neutral-grip pullups. Lots of them. I’ve been experimenting with heavy, weighted chins (BW + 90 lbs), which have made a visible difference in my biceps within the past month.
That said, I still do direct arm work, especially for triceps. Skull crushers, rope pulldowns, heavy dips and french presses all find their way into my workout. For biceps, my routine is as follows:
1.) Weighted chins and neutral grip pullups (BW + 45 pounds) 4 x 6-8
2.) Heavy-ass chins and neutral grip pullups (BW + 90, 115, 125) 3 x 2-3
3.) Static Hold at top of neutral grip pullup (ie: chin over bar) (BW + 125 for as long as I can hold it, x 3)
4.) Curls on pulley station, straight bar (for these I extend my back 45 degrees, for some reason it hits my biceps much better than standing up straight) 3 x 12-15
Triceps (my IMac camera has this automatic flash which washes everything out…they look a lot more impressive under normal lighting conditions)
PimpBot: Impressive! Reminds me of a buddy who did direct arm work (lot of it, in fact), but always started arm workouts with close grip chins with his BW+65-90 pounds and close grip paralell dips with 60-80 pounds. He also benched 300 pounds for 3 reps with a 10 inch grip (though he was only capable of doing “regular width” bench with 200 pounds due to shoulder issues.)
Nice and useful contribution to the thread.
In the last few months I was solely focused on higher rep, more isolational stuff on arms, esp. cable and dumbell work, perhaps now with the new semester I’ll ditch some of this work and change it to heavy ass compounds to see what they do (as I had done it back some time ago. Then my arm workouts were something like this:
A1. close grip chins with weights (3-4 reps)
A2. close grip paralell dips (5-6 reps)
B1. barbell curls, sometimes with fat gripz (8-10 reps)
B2. Close grip bench (6-8 reps)
C1. dumbell incline curls (12 reps per side)
C2. Skullkruscherz with ez bar (12 reps)
D1. hammer or pinwheel curls 12-15 reps per side
D2. overhead tricep extensions 10-12 reps
done 4 rounds of each. Nowadays I solely rely on cables, machines and dumbells, perhaps it’d be wise to give back some of the old stimuli to my sticks. Again, my arms were never big, they were called impressive and cut, but that has more to do with anorexia than actual muscular developement. (Now, ashamed of himself leaves the thread and prays that no negative comments will hit soon…) 