Next to building a big chest, nothing is more sought after for guys who love to train than massive arms. Big guns make a statement, which is probably why most guys train arms for hours in the gym.
They hit every exercise they know until they can’t raise their arms in hopes of finally seeing the gains they’ve been struggling to achieve.
The truth is, you don’t need to spend hours in the gym to build bigger arms. You just need to understand how you can make any exercise or any workout more effective, simply by changing how you perform each exercise.
Building more muscle mass for the biceps and triceps is like every other muscle group – you need a lot of hard work and variety in your training.
One training variable that is often overlooked is tempo.
Modifying the tempo of every repetition in the set will change the training effect. When trying to build more muscle, the focus should always be on the lowering (or eccentric) phase of the repetition.
A recent scientific study in the Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research suggests that performing a slow negative – or controlling the lowering phase of a repetition – will create more muscular damage and build muscle faster.
To enhance this muscle building effect for higher volume sets with moderate weights, I like to prescribe taking 3-5 seconds for the lowering phase of the lift.
When applying this simple change to biceps curls, all you have to do is lower the dumbbells slowly after you curl the weight. This simple change will make your bicep curls (or any exercise) much more effective for building more muscle mass.
But you don’t have to get fancy and use a stopwatch. Simply try to take twice as long to lower the weight as it took you to lift it.
Just a word of caution, when you slow down the tempo for each repetition in the set, you jack up the intensity. This means you will probably have to lower the weight you’re using for the exercise or decrease the number of repetitions in the set.
As a review, modifying the tempo of a repetition – to elicit a greater muscle building effect – can be used with any exercise. When the goal is greater muscle mass, a slow and controlled negative is always recommended. As with all training, focusing on quality movement and trying to achieve a maximal muscle contraction for each and every repetition, will help you smash through training plateaus and make every exercise much more effective.
Jim Smith is a proud Dad and video game junkie. Smitty has been called “one of the most innovative coaches” in the fitness industry. If you’re serious about getting jacked, check out his FREE Mass Report to learn the top 10 proven techniques to get muscle faster.
References:
1. Schoenfeld BJ. The mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy and their application to resistance training. J Strength Cond Res. 2010 Oct;24(10):2857-72.