Q. I’m doing the standing barbell curl, the seated dumbbell curl and the standing dumbbell curl, three sets of each, but my arms aren’t growing. What am I doing wrong?
A. There are at least seven reasons why your arms aren’t growing
l. The three exercises you’re using are similar. More varied exercises may be more effective - for example;
standing barbell curl, supinating dumbbell curl and hammer curl. The two biggest contributors to your front arm mass are your biceps and your brachialis. The brachialis is beneath the biceps.
Both muscles are called arm flexors. The biceps also supinates the forearm. To supinate your forearm, turn your hand so that your thumb rotates outwardly. You can’t do this with a barbell. With dumbbells, start with your elbows straight and hands parallel to each other, or palms down. As you curl, rotate your hands (and thus your wrists and forearms) outwardly as much as possible. On the descent, reverse the movement and pronate your forearms.
2. Your exercise technique isn’t correct. Lift the weight, no faster than two seconds up and another two seconds down; and don’t cheat. Lift the resistance and lower it. Don’t heave it up and drop it. Reduce your weights, if necessary, and use correct technique.
3. You’re doing too much arm work. Cut back to a warm-up set and a single work set for the first arm exercise, and then a single work set for each of the other two exercises. Do this no more than two times a week, but make your sets INTENSE, and add a LITTLE weight to each exercise when possible, but without compromising on exercise technique. Three hard sets for your arms is sufficient. Your arms are given additional work in rows, pulldowns, and chin-ups, so it's easy to overwork them.
4. There’s more to arm work than just working your arm flexors. There’s the triceps (back of the arm) which provides a greater proportion of arm size than the arm flexors. So be sure that you’re not neglecting your triceps, otherwise you'll never end up with big thick powerful arms.
5. You’re not letting your arms recover enough. If you cut corners on your nutrition and have to be woken by an alarm clock on a regular basis (ie: less than 7-8 hours sleep), you are cutting corners on your recuperation, which will harm your bodybuilding progress. Don’t forget that if you’re looking to pack on extra muscle and that means bigger arms also, you have to increase your protein intake, if you can’t eat enough food, you’ll need a good whey protein, such as Promax and nothing beats Creatine for increasing strength and size also.
6. I don’t know how long you’ve trained, or how big your arms are. If they are 17 inches or larger (and you can see your abs), you’re likely to have achieved a superb level of arm development. Obviously if you are holding a lot of fat, your arms could be much bigger. Muscles don’t grow indefinitely, and very few men have the genetics for a lean body with muscular arms bigger than 17 inches.
7. My best trick however to make your arms look massive is to train forearms. Years ago I saw a guy in the gym that had the most fantastic foreams, he was training them every time he did arms and the top of his forearms were the same size as his biceps, with veins running all over them. It just looked freaky. It is a very neglected bodypart, but one that can dramatically improve the size of your arms. I recommend doing forearms wrist curls and reverse curls when you train arms and then playing with a power ball every other day, for more information click here.
Source: Flex
