If you’re hammering away at your hammer curls to no avail, sports scientist Dr Mike Israetel delivers a sharp dose of reality, highlighting the top arm training mistakes we’re making.
In a recent YouTube video, he outlines five of the most common mistakes people make when training arms, from range of motion to outdated programming habits and forgetting to train our forearms. Whether you’re training your arms for aesthetics or performance, these are the principles you’ll want to revisit.
5 Arm Training Mistakes You Need to Avoid
1/ You Don’t Need a Dedicated ‘Arm Day’
The myth that biceps and triceps must be trained together, on the same day, is both outdated and unnecessary. ‘There is no distinct benefit of this,’ Dr Israetel explains. ‘In fact, if your biceps are sufficiently pumped, it actually limits the range of motion on your triceps.’
READ MORE: Want Bigger Biceps? Here’s How Many Curls You Should Really Be Doing
He continues to explain that the problem lies within recovery strategies: ‘Triceps get sore for like two or three days. Biceps recover in a day or two. So if you’re always trying to train them together, you’ll have to needlessly constrict the amount of effort or volume you do for triceps.’
Sure, an arm day can be fun, but ‘if you have to screw up the rest of your programme to keep an arm day in the mix, consider not doing that,’ advises Dr Israetel.
2/ Getting Stuck in Fixed Rep Ranges
‘Sets of 5 to 8 can 100% grow your biceps and triceps really well… so can sets of 12 all the way up to even 30,’ says Dr Israetel. ‘Any rep range that works best for a while will eventually get stale, and variation will promote more growth.’ In other words, don’t be afraid to explore varied rep ranges when your current ones get easy.
3/ Not Maximising the Stretch
‘People do cable extensions halfway down… bicep curls when they don’t ever get a deep stretch.’ And while standing curls might feel tough, Dr Israetel warns they’re often ineffective due to gravity’s unhelpful angle.
The fix for this? Lying dumbbell curls. Which Israetel says is ‘probably one of the most brutal and effective ways to train your bicep’. Why? Because ‘It stretches your bicep under its most maximum load… at that very deep part of the stretch.’
He says this is the same for exercises such as skull crushers: ‘going all the way down… you’re going to get more pumps, more soreness, more growth.’
4/ Not Training Arms Enough
If you’re hitting your arms once a week, and are serious about increasing size, you may want to up the ante says Dr Israetel, ‘Your triceps, you can train in most cases, hard, two to three times a week. Your biceps you can train in most cases hard three to four times a week.
READ MORE: How to Build More Muscle with Fewer Sets, According to New Research
‘These are small muscles, they do not take one week to recover’. If your split allows for it, slot in two to four dedicated arm sessions per week – assuming recovery is on point.
5/ Forgetting the Forearms
‘Your forearms can contribute massively to how big your overall arms look,’ says Dr Israetel. If you want to really maximise how big our arms look, he advises: ‘Three to six sets of some kind of forearm curls… multiple times per week will get you notably bigger forearms.’
This article by Kate Neudecker was originally appeared on Men’s Health UK
