Indirect training can be a powerful intervention.
Planning on a gun show this summer? Coach Kevin Don explains the best way to train your arms.
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Hi listeners, old and new, Coach Kevin Don here with another weekly injection of fitness facts!
Last week, I got into a conversation with someone about arms. I was out at a coffee shop and someone asked me what exercise I do for my forearms and then got in an argument with me when he refused to believe the answer was “I don’t train them.” Reminded me of a funny anecdote by the actor Rowan Atkinson, who was in a car dealership when someone said “You look like Mr Bean.” When he confirmed that he was indeed the actor who played Mr Bean, he discovered an angry person who wouldn’t believe him and didn’t appreciate being trolled.
So, what's the deal? Do some people just have big forearms, calves, or any other muscle? Well yes, maybe, but also, whilst I don’t directly train my forearms, I do still hit them in my training. I train in Judo and there is a fairly significant importance on grip strength—being able to hold onto your opponent and throw them is the key concept. Regular listeners will know I also train in gymnastics, another sport with a lot of grip involved.
Indirect training can be a powerful intervention. Let’s think about the animal kingdom. Visualize for a moment, if you can, the vast African Savannah. The tall grass being swept side to side by the warm breeze. Over the horizon stomps an elephant, followed closely by a herd of gazelle. The gazelle skip lightly over the land as the elephant treads somewhat more heavily because they have vastly different leg sizes. Now, I’ve not seen elephants doing squats, so what gives? Well, an elephant NEEDS big legs to support its large torso and body mass and the gazelle, well—it doesn’t. The supporting structure below the load is under compression and must increase in diameter to be able to prop up the load above.
The same is true for humans when we utilize indirect training. If we think back to the episode on resisting the aging process, we discussed just this when identifying the barbell squat as a great exercise for hedging against the processes of sarcopenia (loss of muscle mass) and osteopenia (loss of bone mineral density). Because most of the body will be below the barbell in the squat, this makes it a superior choice for increasing muscle mass and bone density throughout the body, irrespective of the fact that the squat is traditionally considered a leg exercise.
So what does this mean for training arms? Well, it means that if we can figure out which compound movements allow us to have our arms underneath the load, we can take advantage of that time under tension in support to indirectly train arms without having to set aside a dedicated arm exercise! I know I don’t have the time to do 15 to 20 minutes of writs and forearm curls, and if you’re also in a time crunch, prioritizing exercises with compound movements and not isolated movements can make your training more efficient.
Both the strict press (also known as the military press or standing overhead press) and the bench press would be great choices. I would favor the bench press over and above the strict press purely because you can typically bench more weight than you can press overhead. side from sport-specific applications, forearm strength is important as part of the arm because the 7 major forearm muscles are involved in the manipulation of the thumb and also different types of gripping, from pinching to cylindrical-like in opening a tub of protein! In terms of the aging process, grip strength has been shown in studies (including one meta-analysis with over 2 million participants) to be a reliable indicator of mortality, specifically in cancer patients.
So the overall message here is that, if you want to have big arms, we need to expand our mindset beyond the “gym bro” mentality, because if you say arm exercises to most people, they will immediately think “bicep curl.” From an aesthetic perspective, I can understand why, with the biceps being on the front of the body where you and others can admire them, but the arm as a whole should be trained if you want to stay healthy and fit. Ed Coan, the greatest powerlifter of all time, said that biceps are like ornaments on a Christmas Tree. In fact, if we’re talking muscle mass, the triceps are a significantly larger muscle in the arm, and triceps training would therefore result in a bigger increase in muscle size than biceps training would.
If you are planning on a gun show this summer, focus on the large upper body compounds like the bench press and standing overhead press, which will not only help to indirectly increase arm size, but will also aid in our pursuit of health. In my very first episode here, we defined fitness as the absence of disease and therefore, it would be somewhat unusual of me not to circle back to how we can improve our physical condition overall rather than just a singular aesthetic ideal. So, go forth and train your biceps and forearms with compound pulls like pull-ups and train your triceps and shoulders with compound presses.
Any questions for me, about training or otherwise, send me an email at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com and I will be so happy to hear from you!