Category: Upper Body Workout

How to Increase Your Arm Strength

Today, I’m going to teach you how to increase arm strength. 

I am excited to share with you this today!

Let me give you a couple of quick tips you can implement right now. 

Everyone loves nice arms and they’ll go in, they’ll do some curls, they’ll do certain things, and they’re trying to increase just how their arms look.

But today, I’m gonna share with you a couple of secrets that maybe you’re not doing that you could really quickly implement in your arm strength workout real quick.

Here we go!

I’m going to start off with the fact, just one quick tip is, when you’re doing a bicep curl, you’re not going to be able to curl an obscene amount of weight, or even if you did, it wouldn’t probably be that great pf for so you’d be using a lot of other muscles other than just your biceps. 

Chin Up

People don’t think about it but a chin up, your secondary muscle that’s working, use your bicep. But if you keep your body in an erect position, up and down, you’re really going to engage your biceps a lot more and harder because you got to think like you’re curling or you’re pulling up whatever you weigh, 180, 200, 220 pounds. You’re engaging that bicep a lot more with a lot more resistance than just doing a bicep curl. What I do, and actually, we did that this week, as part of the accelerated PT program is we did a heavy chin-up or underhand grip pull down. 

Underhand Grip Pull Down

If you can’t do a chin-up, no big deal, you can do an assisted chin-up or doing an underhand grip pull down, so if you’re sitting down, underhand grip pulldown. 

You would also superset that with a bicep curl. You can either do any type of bicep curl, whether it’s a preacher curl, incline dumbbell curl, something where you’re really isolating the bicep, but you’re hitting it hard and heavy with a heavily loaded exercise, and then following it up with something more of isolation, where you can really just kind of isolate the bicep, and just make sure all the blood flow is going into the bicep. 

About tearing down muscle, the only way to attend to that muscle and put that much resistance against it is by doing something that you can do a lot of weight on.

Alright! So there’s one quick tip for the bicep.

I’m going to give you a quick tip for the tricep, and then like I said, I’m gonna give you two.

Floor Press

For your tricep, it’d be the same premise, doing a bench press, or something heavy, where you’re using the tricep as a secondary body part that’s working. Something you could put a heavy load on, and then going into a more of an isolation movement, a great power exercise for the tricep.

So, there’s a close grip bench press that’s really good but there’s one better. I actually learned this one in high school, when Mike Metzer, a world-class bench presser back in the olden days, taught me how to do a floor press.

It’s the same grip if not a little bit wider than your bench, but you’re only coming down halfway. Floor, press obviously can be on the floor, you’re going to come down to your elbows 90 degrees, and then you’re locking it out. Okay? So coming down 90 degrees, locking out. 

Why is it a floor press even laying on a bench press?

All I did is I’m fortunate enough, I have a power rack so I just raised the floor. I brought the bars up to a point where if my elbows would be touching the floor. You can load it up, you can make it super heavy, you’re pretty much at 110 to 120% of your bench press. If you bench 225, you could probably put like 245 on there and still get a few reps. It’s a good way to increase your bench press as well. 

Tricep Kickbacks

You would follow floor press with isolation movements such as tricep kickbacks, or rope press downs, or reverse grip tricep press downs, a good isolation movement. 

An isolation movement means a single joint is moving a post to a compress joint movement where multiple joints are moving. 

Alright! Those are two quick tips, power movement superset with an isolation movement.

Tricep Pressdown

The second tip for your arm strength is a negative motion.

What’s the negative motion?

It is where you’re going to be doing resistance, you’d be doing a tricep press down.

You’d want to be doing a little bit heavier than you can really do. You’re just going to hold it there and come back, super slow like three to five seconds, use some force, get it down there, and then you’re going to come up in a negative motion, three to five seconds. Nice and slow. You would do that for three to five repetitions. It’s like five is 25 seconds under tension where your muscles are really strained out.

Preacher Curl

Now, you’d be using isolation movements, such as a preacher curl for the biceps, and you would curl it up. It’s a little heavier than you can do, and then you would come down nice and slow. A lot of times you’ll be stuck so you don’t want to use some extra body weight to get it up there but then you’d be coming down nice and slow with good control. This is where a great spotter would come in, and help you out. Same thing, three to five seconds, good negative motion, that’s what’s going to help you to increase that muscular strength of your arms. 

Hopefully, these are some great tips. Take this as it is something that you could add to your workout programs.

If you guys really don’t know what to do, and you’re really tired of spinning your wheels, just message me. This is something I’m very gifted at, is working with people just like you who are looking to try to make gains and are trying to figure out what’s going to work best for them. These are some quick tips to increase that arm strength.