[quote]hueyOT wrote:
Dirty Tiger wrote:
This thread has convinced me to do curls twice a week.
Don’t most powerlifters do direct bicep work to avoid tearing thme during heavy deads?
nope.[/quote]
This guy does curls.
[quote]Professor X wrote:
hueyOT wrote:
Dirty Tiger wrote:
This thread has convinced me to do curls twice a week.
Don’t most powerlifters do direct bicep work to avoid tearing thme during heavy deads?
nope.
This guy does curls.[/quote]
so? and i don’t think he competes in powerlifting, just strongman stuff.
also, he needs those big biceps in order to sell met-rx supplements.
bottom line: if you want great biceps, you’ve gotta do direct biceps work.
Here’s the deal. Most powerlifters avoid direct arm work because they are just looking at the three big lifts. Do they have giant arms? Yes. Putting up a 500 pound bench press or pulling a 600 pound deadlift will not only make your arms big but in most cases your whole body. Are their arms defined? Do their biceps have nice peaks when flexed? Most times no. Direct arm work is going to give you that nice definition we all dream of. Compare a Dave Tate to a Christian Thibadeau.
I think the vacilation between the two styles of training is because there are too many examples of doing too much of one or the other. We’ve all seen the guys in the gym that only do arms and have spindly little legs and of course there are guys out there with large core muscles and spaghetti arms. The trick is to incorporate symmetry into your routine. When Chad Waterbury told people, in several of his routines, that the arms don’t need to be trained directly I think he opened a big can of worms. Personally, I think that people need to concentrate on a specific goal. Now, that might be to have giant arms, or to just be strong and throw definition out the window.
Just doing bicep curls and tricep pushdowns will not give you the huge guns that you crave. Your routine must include benches and rows with isolation exercises for a supplementary follow up. In my own experience I have had an arm day once a week during certain routines and had great results. Direct arm work is just common sense to an experienced lifter.
The difference between A and B based on their chosen exercises? Well I think we’ve all seen what happens in a hypothetical-question-thread with no real information in which to accurately judge a difference between two lifters.
Just don’t do your fucking curls in the squat rack.
chiefy: since when do powerlifters have huge arms? since when do powerlifters all bench 500 pounds?
wtf are you talking about, dude? there are seperate weight classes. and powerlifters by no means have ‘huge’ arms porportional to their sizes.
sure there might be this powerlifter with big arms or that once, but if you watch a lot of powerlifting videos and meet a lot of powerlifters, they by no means have impressive looking arms as a standard.
guess what? most of them don’t train arms directly.
Ok, Huey, I’ll admit you’re right in the powerlifting department. I guess what I meant to say was that powerlifters with big benches have big arms and they don’t directly arm train. I think we’re agreeing to disagree here. Here’s the rub, show me a scrawny powerlifter even in a light weight class. If you weigh 120 and you’re putting up 225 your arms are going to be large by proxy.
[quote]chiefy wrote:
Ok, Huey, I’ll admit you’re right in the powerlifting department. I guess what I meant to say was that powerlifters with big benches have big arms and they don’t directly arm train. I think we’re agreeing to disagree here. Here’s the rub, show me a scrawny powerlifter even in a light weight class. If you weigh 120 and you’re putting up 225 your arms are going to be large by proxy.[/quote]
i still disagree. it really depends on your benching style. i’ve seen many strong powerlifter who don’t look impressive by ANY standard. just check out powerlifting videos of dudes in the 185 pounds classes and lower. many of them are far from jacked. and most of the heavier dudes aren’t really pumped up either when you consider their body weights.
strength and size are different things.
The strength of a muscle and its size are related. Check out the articles on this site for that information.
I’m getting off this post and going to the gym.
Well how many people under 185 have big arms anyways. If someone bench presses 500 lbs in any style, they will have some meaty arms.
Alwyn wrote/writes about this sort of reaction in his articles about the pendulum swinging too far back and forth. We need to bring it back to the middle.
Direct arm work and compound movements=big arms. Only direct arm with no compound movements or only compound movements with no direct arm work=not as big arms.
I have 15in arms at rest and 17in flexed.I am currently 205lbs,I dont do any direct arm work but I’m starting.My dad is 260lbs and has 20-23in arms,he doesn’t work out like we do but he has to lift things 200+lbs everyday(yes weekends).
Having said that the men on both sides of my family have no problem getting big when they do lift(granfaters/uncles/dad).I’m only doing direct work to get the shape I want since their isn’t much definition.
I really think it’s 50/50(genetics/work),because not everyone can get “big arms”…for me thats 20+ inches
guns definition, just like ALL definition on the body, is largely a function of adipose tissue (FAT) surrounding the muscle, correct?
does anyone have a dictionary? it’s ok, I got the definition! (pointing to my guns) haha.
Curling rules, get over it.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
So what are the rules of curling that we should get over?[/quote]
I don’t know. Ask these guys.
This is actually very interesting, I still dont include direct arm work into my routines because I know I need more overall mass before I should start to ‘fine tune’ so to speak.
[quote]Professor X wrote:
trap_builder wrote:
Professor X wrote:
trap_builder wrote:
BarneyFife wrote:
I do not understand why people think that not training the arms is the way to make them big.
you ARE training your arms while you are rowing and pressing, you are just not training them exclusively.
No shit, Sherlock, but no one even 5 years ago would have ever said that this was enough for full biceps development.
The fact that you need direct arm work to get the best results does not mean that everybody does.
I know a couple of people who have an amazing biceps peak who don’t train their arms directly. I dont think we all activate our different muscles involved in rowing in the same percentajes as anyone else, therefore rowing will produce different growth effects on different people.
I think this issue is more of “what you like to do” more than what you need to do, unless you are a competing bodybuilder. I believe this because naturally we will go very intense on what we like to do, instead of what we think we need to do.
For example, if you are a person who does not like direct arm work, you can sort of compensate the direct arm work with more compounds. After doing 10 x 3 for rows, just wait some minutes until you are ready for more (instead of going to the smith and “finishing” your muscles), and then change the rowing grip and invert the sets x reps to 3 x 10, or even 5 x 5 if you don’t like high reps like me.
Nobody lives their life exactly like anyone else, therefore I dont think we should all agree on how to train arms the same way.
Does not like direct arm work? Is that like people who don’t like squats? This is stupid. If you want to develop your entire body to an upper limit, you don’t go around ignoring certain muscle groups because you don’t like training it. For some reason, this seems to actually make sense to some people with regards to biceps when no one would say the same about legs or back training. I am not just looking to “activate” my biceps. I am looking for the most strength and size in them that I can build along with everything else.[/quote]
Your squat example really supports the people who favor compounds over isolation exercises since one of the big positive aspects of squats is the growth it causes “all over the body.”
It’s not the same to say “i dont want to do barbell curls” vs. “i dont want to squat”.
Which seems more similar to the squat, the barbell row or the barbell curl?
I also don’t agree with your statement about “ignoring certain muscle groups” because if you are doing more rows, you are actually doing more work for your arms, not ignoring them.
I dont think curls are bad, I think they are a good option to use rarely on days when you aren’t feeling very energetic enough to do only compounds.
[quote]chiefy wrote:
Here’s the deal. Most powerlifters avoid direct arm work because they are just looking at the three big lifts. Do they have giant arms? Yes. Putting up a 500 pound bench press or pulling a 600 pound deadlift will not only make your arms big but in most cases your whole body. Are their arms defined? Do their biceps have nice peaks when flexed? Most times no. Direct arm work is going to give you that nice definition we all dream of. Compare a Dave Tate to a Christian Thibadeau.
I think the vacilation between the two styles of training is because there are too many examples of doing too much of one or the other. We’ve all seen the guys in the gym that only do arms and have spindly little legs and of course there are guys out there with large core muscles and spaghetti arms. The trick is to incorporate symmetry into your routine. When Chad Waterbury told people, in several of his routines, that the arms don’t need to be trained directly I think he opened a big can of worms. Personally, I think that people need to concentrate on a specific goal. Now, that might be to have giant arms, or to just be strong and throw definition out the window.
Just doing bicep curls and tricep pushdowns will not give you the huge guns that you crave. Your routine must include benches and rows with isolation exercises for a supplementary follow up. In my own experience I have had an arm day once a week during certain routines and had great results. Direct arm work is just common sense to an experienced lifter.
The difference between A and B based on their chosen exercises? Well I think we’ve all seen what happens in a hypothetical-question-thread with no real information in which to accurately judge a difference between two lifters.
Just don’t do your fucking curls in the squat rack.[/quote]
you cant compare arms of a christian t who cares about his body fat with a dave tate who doesn’t
if you compare them before christian cared about his bodyfat you will get different answers.
you’ll have to see after dave follows Berardi’s advice but it still wont be fair because i dont see dave tate wanting to reach 5% body fat.
I can’t believe people are still arguing about this. What the fuck is there to not understand? If you include direct arm work you will get more mass and development than with compounds alone. And anyone who puts the question of “either-or” must be a complete retard. Why do you have to choose? Is somebody holding a gun to your head saying you must do one or the other forever? Because I don’t see a person limiting their gains in such a blunt way and not being an idiot.
No matter how many overhead presses and different pulling movements you perform your shoulders will not be as wide as when you add a significant amount of lateral raises. Whoever you see with big biceps or triceps claiming they only do compound movements - their biceps and triceps would be even bigger and better developed with direct work added.
[quote]trap_builder wrote:
Your squat example really supports the people who favor compounds over isolation exercises since one of the big positive aspects of squats is the growth it causes “all over the body.”
It’s not the same to say “i dont want to do barbell curls” vs. “i dont want to squat”.
Which seems more similar to the squat, the barbell row or the barbell curl?
I also don’t agree with your statement about “ignoring certain muscle groups” because if you are doing more rows, you are actually doing more work for your arms, not ignoring them.
I dont think curls are bad, I think they are a good option to use rarely on days when you aren’t feeling very energetic enough to do only compounds.
[/quote]
You are one anal retentive moron. Let’s use leg extensions as the example. Does that satisfy you? The main point was people use that as an excuse to not train legs AT ALL, not because they do everything BUT squats. I guess that really needed to be explained fully.
Further, if you are doing rows and you feel that is MORE work for your arms, you are doing rows wrong. When I am done training back, while there may be a small pump in my arms, most of it is in my back. It is also NOTHING like the pump in my arms after doing a few sets of direct work for them with very heavy weight.
Big Arms? Has anyone said a damn word about training triceps?
Curls and direct bicep work is a necessity, but if you are looking for sheer girth - train the triceps. Twice as much bang for the buck.