Beef up your arms

The muscles of the upper arm (biceps and triceps) when fully developed are the most spectacular muscles in the body. All women love strong, lean arms and all men want big toned 'guns'. Well now you can ride the road to your own powerful arms.

The anatomy chart
In order to gain the results you want from arm training you must understand and appreciate the anatomy of the muscle groups involved.

The triceps
The triceps, as the name suggests, are made up of 3 separate heads - the long, medial and short head. In order to get the most from your tricep training it is advisable that you train each head, either separately or by completing complex exercises that stress each head in unison.

Exercises for triceps
With this in mind I suggest that during each tricep workout that you perform two of the following exercises:

Complex movements • Bench dips • Parallel bars dips • Close grip bench press

Isolated movements • Press downs • Single arm press downs • Single arm overhead press • Overhead press

Sets and reps: Aim to perform 3 sets and 8-12 repetitions during each session.

Learn how to perform each exercise outlined above here

The biceps
The bicep muscle group is made up of two heads, the Bicep Brachii and Brachialis muscle. There function is to move the forearm towards the shoulder (elbow flexion) and to pronate the wrist.

Exercises for the biceps
Flexion of the elbow is, by its very nature an isolation movement - i.e. no other muscle group plays a part in this movement (apart from the stablising muscles of the shoulder girdle and the forearms). With that in mind one biceps exercise will be very similar to the next.

Thus, I recommend that you perform only one of the following exercises during each bicep / arm workout.

Bicep exercises
• Preacher curl
• Standing barbell curl
• Seated dumbbell curl
• Twisting bicep curls
• Hammer curls

Sets and reps: Aim to perform 3 sets of 6-10 repetitions during each session.