Why Your Arms Are Small (How To Fix)

0:00 All right. So, if you've been training for a while, staying consistent, doing everything right, eating clean, sleeping good, but your arms are still small, and you look like a beginner, this is why. This is how you can fix it, and how to actually blow up your arms. I'm going to cover everything, including the best exercises, how much volume you should be doing, the frequency, smartest way to really blow up your arms as fast as possible. Because in my first couple years of lifting, I was getting stronger. Like I had a decent bench press. I could bench 225, but my arms still looked really, really skinny. And it wasn't because I wasn't training them. I was training them, but I was just doing a couple mistakes that you could be making as well. All right. And the first mistake I was making was way

0:46 too much volume. I was doing light weight, but super high reps. I was doing hammer curls or like just normal bicep curls, but I would do like 50 reps. 50 reps with like 20 pounds. Absolutely ridiculous. You do not need to do that many reps. And the reason why I thought it was good because I was feeling this burn. I was like, "Oh my goodness, getting such a hard burn and you know, crazy pump that's going to grow my biceps, right?" No. What you really need is progressive overload. And the best rep range to, you know, make sure you're you're growing is gaining strength is going to be in the 5 to 30 rep range. But what's the point of doing 30 reps when you could just do, you know, 10 12

1:33 reps and still get a really good pump, but save time, not fatigue yourself as hard. It's a lot more ideal. Just do 10, 12 reps, work in that rep range, and focus on progressively overloading. So adding more weight to the exercise and reps over time, sometimes a little lower, eight reps can be good as well. But what you need to be doing is progressively overloading. So say you hit 12 reps, that was easy. Okay, next week add more weight. Bump it up by five pounds. Now you're doing bicep curls with 55s instead of 50s. And that is how you grow them. But not only do you need good form, you know, progressive overload, time under tension, all these things, you also have to have great exercise selection because if you're doing a goofy exercise, just like a

2:19 random uh pump curl where you hold it, and then you do five up here, five down here, okay? Then you rotate it, do five this way, okay? Then you rotate it and do another five this way. Like these random fitness influencers tell you you have to just rotate your arm each time and you and you have to twist it like this and then twist it up and down. Like what the [ __ ] do you think that's doing? What why would that make any sense? No, you can break it up. Okay, so say you want to target the short head of your bicep, then do preacher curls. Um preacher curls is great because you can really just focus on that short head. You're not using any momentum. you have a pad so you can place your arm down there and

3:05 just isolate the short head of your bicep. So that's crucial, right? But now you need to target the long head, which is the other part, you know, and the one of the best exercises for that is going to be the incline curl. So you can put your shoulder blades back. Um, obviously you would want to incline about, you know, 30° or so, 45° and then just do a curl, but you want to go all the way down, feel the stretch in your bicep, and that's going to target your long head really, really well versus, you know, doing a random twist and curl like, no, it doesn't make sense. You need to have a movement where you're getting that stretch position because the stretch, the full range of motion, that is where you can be getting a shitload of gains. But if you're not

3:50 doing that, you're going to be missing out. Another one, Beijian curl, if you feel like that's more comfortable, because I've had clients in the past tell me that their forearms hurt um when they do this incline curl. But the Beijian curl, that is where you do a single arm curl with the cable facing away from it and you're leaning forward and you're still getting a really, really deep stretch. So that's another good alternative as well. But now we've got the short head, the long head, you still need to hit one more head, and that's going to be the brachiialis. This is going to be the part of your bicep where it adds width, the outer head. And if you do hammer curls, it's going to hit it very, very well. So you could either do hammer curls just with dumbbells or with the cable with the rope. I prefer the dumbbells. I find I

4:38 can get a better grip, a better pump when I do it with the dumbbells. And you know, I even like to cheat a little bit. And everybody says, "Oh, cheating is bad. You shouldn't do that." Well, you can use cheating to your advantage. So, first I would say start out clean. Like, don't use momentum. Have a good form with the hammer curls. But if you want to bang out those last couple reps, try and get an extra five more. You can use some momentum. You can start doing it single arm and swing a little bit. And really, that's just to have high intensity because Yeah, that's another thing. You got to be pushing yourself every single [ __ ] set to the limit. Now, mainly that last set. I know some people, they really don't like going to failure, one to two reps shy of failure. You're going to be getting a decent amount of growth. I still would

5:24 recommend pushing yourself to failure on that last set. Um, if you don't want to like have too much fatigue, but most of the time you not you do not need to be worrying about that. You really need to be worrying about pushing to failure and progressively overloading and of course with good form. Right? So, that's going to break down the best biceps exercises. Now, let's go into triceps. So, for triceps, same thing. You know, you can do so many goofy exercises where like a like a kickback where it's Yeah, there's so many bad exercises out there where that people will recommend. So, what I found when I started isolating them more, that's when they grew. So, the main one was the skull crusher. And not just any skull crusher, no, the incline skull crusher. The reason why I love the

6:10 incline uh skull crusher is because I can get a deeper stretch on it versus when I was doing it just normal flat, I I had a harder time getting a deeper stretch, a better contraction with my triceps. But for some reason, the the skull crusher now it feels really good. It took me a long time to understand it, to learn it because it felt awkward at first setting up the incline and lifting this easy bar above my head. when I extend it up and back, not flaring out my elbows, but locking them in place. Oh my goodness, that actually just blew them up. And that's another thing. You got to treat your arms like it's a heavy compound movement. You don't treat your arms like it's a, you know, secondary

6:55 movement. It's a secondary thing. You leave it for the end of your workout. Well, yeah, of course you're going to have small arms, but no. If you, you know, treat every single exercise or especially these weighted ones like a heavy compound movement just like you would with your bench, you should do the same with your arms. You should do a weighted dip. You know, that's a really good compound movement for your arms. It's yes, it's going to hit your chest, but it's also going to hit your triceps really hard, especially if you if you have a more narrow grip. Your chest is up. That that's crazy. You know, if you want to hit your chest more, then obviously, you know, flare out your elbows a little more, go wider. That is going to hit your chest. But you can blow up your triceps from doing the weighted dip. That's going to hit, you know, just the whole entire tricep. Now,

7:41 those the overhead skull crusher, that's more of the long head, and you can get a pretty nasty stretch on that, which is really the most important uh if you want to grow your triceps as big as possible because the long head makes up the biggest portion of the tricep. Now, if you want to hit the lateral head, that's going to be that the outer part, like the horseshoe of your tricep. Of course, you've probably done this one before, but that's going to come down to the basic tricep extension. Now, you can either do that with a rope. You can either do that with a straight bar. I notice that when I do it with a straight bar, I can lift more weight. I feel pretty secure, locked in. Now, when I do the rope, I do find I can get maybe a bit more of a contraction sometimes

8:29 because then you can really stretch it and pull the rope apart and squeeze. You know, that can feel really good on your triceps, but at the same time, I can't do as much weight. And you know, if the rope is the wrong length, sometimes it doesn't feel as good as well. But I like to do both straight bar or rope, it's not a huge deal. Just choose one. And it's important to have that in your routine for the lateral head. And that's another tip leading on your routine, your split. This is super huge, super important. Uh, if you have a really weird split where you're only training one muscle group a day, like chest, back, shoulders, bicep one day, tricep another day, that's not going to be optimal. What you need is frequency. So, instead of just train uh training your

9:14 arms one day a week, you could be growing them so much more if you were training them two or three times a week. So, you want to structure your split, you know, the muscle groups you want to grow. You don't have to go crazy, honestly. Everybody does like, you know, says four four sets. That's what I did when I started, like four sets for every exercise. So much volume. You don't really need that much. All you need is 10 to 20 sets. So, you could start out with 10, 14 sets or so for your biceps, for your triceps, and see how that feels. You could split it up to two sessions. That's typically what I do. I'll have a day where it's push, and I'll hit triceps on the push day, and then pull. I'll hit biceps on the pole day with my back because you don't need a whole day dedicated just to your

9:59 biceps. Now, if you wanted a whole day dedicated to your arms, absolutely you could do that as well and that works great. You could do just biceps and triceps and that's cool. Or you could do shoulders and arms, which is what a lot of people like and I I I like it a lot too. I've done it in the past, but for me, doing the upper lower push pull leg split works really well for five times a week. Structure your split based on how many days a week you want to train. You know, if you want to train just four days a week, you could do push, pull, legs, arms. You're only training legs once a week, but you know, this this video isn't about how to grow your legs. This video is about how to grow your arms. You could also just hit them twice a week, you know, with the push and pull split as well. So, that's going to be huge frequency, exercise selection, and

10:45 the volume, you know, doing 10, 14. If that's not enough, you could bump it up all the way to 20 sets, but 20 sets is probably going to be overkill, right? If you train hard till failure, you really only need two sets. That that's it. Two sets because it's about progressive overload, that's a sign, like if you're weak, if you're only lifting, let's say, 20 pounds with the hammer curl. Well, that's why you're small. Imagine if you could lift 40 lbs with the hammer curl. Imagine how much bigger your arms would be if you're lifting more. There's going to be a massive difference there, right? It's not like you need to do 50 reps and four sets with light weight. No, you need to be lifting as heavy as you can with good form. And that's what's going

11:30 to really grow them. All right? And it's not going to happen overnight. But to sum everything up, you know, you do 10, 14 sets for biceps and triceps, maybe a bit more for triceps if you're doing pressing movements. Then you train them frequently, two to three times a week. You rest, you recover, you have perfect form, and you progressive overload. Man, if you just did that for six months, you would see a huge difference. So, that's what you have to implement. And if you can't progressive overload, well, you have to you have to ask yourself like, what's holding you back? Is it your recovery? Are you not are you doing too much? Or is it your sleep? Are you not sleeping eight hours? Are you getting only five, six? Or is it your diet? Are you eating McDonald's and [ __ ] fried chicken every day and you're a fat ass and you don't actually apply you don't

12:17 eat protein and you don't recover and have carbs before and after training? You know, I've I've got more videos on nutrition, but if you want to bulk up and being in a calorie surplus, yeah, it's going to be a little easier to grow your arms. Does that mean you can't grow them in a calorie deficit and cut? No, you can still grow your arms while you cut down, but you have to have everything in place. Diet, sleep, and training. And if you want more help with this, having a tailored plan specifically for you uh to make sure you grow the muscle groups you want to grow as effectively as possible while fasttracking your progress instead of spinning your wheels, you know, staying stuck, then apply for coaching link bio or shoot me DM on Instagram. And I appreciate you boys watching this video. Let's [ __ ] go. Grow your arms and let's get it. Peace.