How to Build Big, Strong Arms at Home
An Evidence-Based Guide for Fitness Generalists
Can a regular guy build big, strong arms training at home? Undoubtedly, yes! You don’t need a gym, perfect genes, or even your youth. In this blog, I’ll show you how any guy can build bigger, stronger arms at home.
The primary goal will be aesthetics: bigger arms. At a minimum, we want to fill our sleeves. But this is Adventure Driven Fitness, and I, for one, don’t want size at all costs. I want to finish my next Ironman with bigger arms than the last one. I want strong arms to carry me through my next OCR. And I want to be a healthy, fit 80-year-old–an 80-year-old with big arms.
Thus, I’ll show you how to incorporate multi-joint exercises for raw upper arm strength, use isolation exercises with good form to reduce injury risk, improve joint durability, and optimize mobility, and build a program that works for you.
Use the links below to navigate the different sections and remember to bookmark the page.
My Top 4 at Home Upper Arm Exercises
Biceps
Understanding basic anatomy is crucial to becoming an accomplished strength athlete. If you’re serious about training, here’s what you need to know. The biceps consist of two heads: the long head and the short head. Beneath these muscles lies the brachialis, which, although not visible, plays an important role in increasing arm size as it develops.
The brachioradialis, located on top of your forearm, further contributes to the “look” of big arms. Training this muscle enhances grip and wrist strength, which improves performance in OCR-style lifts, traverses, and carries.
By integrating the following two biceps exercises with a comprehensive back program, you can optimally develop these muscles for both size and strength.
Seated Dumbbell Curls
Seated Dumbbell Curls are one of my favorite biceps exercises you can do at home. They train your biceps across their full range of motion while providing a nice deep stretch at the bottom. That stretch can cause stretch mediated hypertrophy, leading to greater muscle growth.
Seated Dumbbell Curl Cues:
Starting Position: Palms face forward with your elbows behind you.
Utilize a Full Range of Motion: Each reps starts with a deep stretch at the bottom and ends with a full contraction at the top.
Controlled Descent: Lower weight with control back to a full stretch.
Embrace a Deep Stretch: Descend into a deep stretch to enhance mobility and promote muscle hypertrophy. However, avoid going so low that it causes joint discomfort or compromises your strength.
Hammer Curls
Hammer Curls are another staple of my own training. They add strength and size to both your biceps and brachioradialis making them ideal for obstacle course racers.
Hammer Curl Cues:
Starting Position: Elbows at side and thumbs facing forward.
Utilize a Full Range of Motion: Each reps starts at the bottom and ends with a full contraction at the top.
Controlled Descent: Lower weight with control back to a full stretch.
Triceps
The triceps muscle consists of three heads: the lateral, medial, and long heads. The long head, the largest of the three, extends across both the elbow and shoulder joints. Therefore, when your elbows are positioned below your shoulders, the long head cannot effectively contribute to lifting movements due to excessive 'slack'. As a result, many traditional triceps exercises fail to effectively target the triceps' largest portion—the long head.
It makes a big difference!
A recent study found that triceps extensions (detailed below) achieved 40% greater growth in the triceps compared to triceps pushdowns.The same holds true for horizontal presses like bench press and pushups. By combining triceps exercises that effectively target the long head with traditional multi-joint chest exercises, you can maximize your gains.
Triceps Extensions
Triceps Extensions are my go to triceps exercise and work all three heads of your triceps. If you’re training at home all you need are some dumbbells. If you are at a gym, try the cable machine.
Triceps Extension Cues:
Utilize a Full Range of Motion: Each reps starts at the bottom and ends with a full extension at the top.
Controlled Descent: Lower weight with control back to a full stretch.
Embrace a Deep Stretch: Descend into a deep stretch to enhance mobility and promote muscle hypertrophy. However, avoid going so low that it causes joint discomfort or compromises your strength.
Skull Crushers
Skull Crushers are another great exercise that can be done at home. They too work all three heads of your triceps.
Skull Crusher Cues:
Shoulders Stay Still: Lower the weight to just above your forehead moving only your elbows.
Utilize a Full Range of Motion: Each reps starts at the bottom and ends with a full contraction at the top.
Controlled Descent: Lower weight with control back to a nice triceps stretch.
How to Train Your Arms for Size and Strength
Building muscle requires significant effort. Typically, you should aim to train within 1-3 repetitions of failure. Failure occurs when you cannot complete another repetition without compromising your form. As you approach failure, your movements will generally begin to slow down
For example, during curls, you reach failure when you can no longer lift the weight fully without severely leaning back, thrusting your hips forward, or employing some other nonsense.
If you’re training close to failure, then the number of reps you can do will be determined by how heavy the weight is. Heavier weights necessitate lower repetitions (5-10), which are excellent for developing strength and stimulating connective tissues. Conversely, lighter weights permit higher repetitions (18-30), ideal for minimizing fatigue and reducing joint wear and tear.
Training hard across a spectrum of 5-30 repetitions can effectively build muscle. Employing a variety of intensities—from low to high repetitions—tends to yield the greatest overall gains.
For a deeper dive into how to train to build muscle, check out the following section of my article, “Body Recomposition: How to lose fat while building muscle”. LINK HERE
Having covered the basics, let's dive into some specific recommendations.
Biceps Training: Big multi-joint lifts, such as chin-ups and rows, are perfect for low-repetition, heavy biceps training. They’ll improve your biceps strength and strengthen your joints. Conversely, curls are ideal for medium (10-18 reps) to high (18-30 reps) repetition sets. This provides a nice contrast in intensity (which tends to build more muscle), and it gives your connective tissue a chance to recover. Medium to high rep work will often cause intense burning in the target muscle, requiring lots of effort to push yourself close to failure.
Triceps Training: Similarly, utilize heavy presses such as bench presses, push-ups, or overhead presses for low-repetition, heavy triceps training and triceps isolation exercises for medium to high repetition work.
Addressing Nagging Joint Pain: If high-repetition exercises are causing joint irritation, something is definitely wrong. Try adjusting your form. For instance, triceps extensions can be finicky and even slight adjustments in the position of your elbows or wrists can often make a big difference. Moreover, there are TONS of viable arm exercises. These happen to be my favorites, but if they don’t work for you, experiment with some of the others. Just keep in mind the basic anatomy principles outlined above.
How Much Training Do You Need to Grow Your Arms?
When you train hard with proper technique, total training volume emerges as the critical variable for muscle growth. Training volume, measured in sets, is the total amount of work you do per muscle per week.
Typically, maximizing your training volume while ensuring adequate recovery produces the quickest results. Rapid, drug-free transformations typically involve training six days a week. It’s a ton of volume and a massive commitment.
Fortunately, you can make steady progress with less training, enabling those with limited time, interest or recovery capacity to achieve impressive results. Below are some general guidelines to illustrate the relationship between training volume and muscle growth.
Total Newbies: If you’ve never lifted weights before, then any amount of lifting is going to lead to some strength and muscle gains. But those gains will end quickly, if your volume is too low.
Beginner: If you’ve been lifting for less than a year or two (or you’ve trained longer but inconsistently and on a poor program), you can likely make gains on anything between 6-15 sets per week. If you can recover, then more sets causes more growth.
Intermediates: After the first year or two (of training hard and consistently with a good program), you often need more volume to keep making progress, and the range might be more like 10-25 sets per week.
Maintenance: Typically, you can maintain with something like 4-6 sets per week. For instance, I do about 6 sets per week to maintain when I’m training for big ultra-endurance races. That way I can focus the majority of my time and energy on Ironman or Spartan Ultra training.
If you’d like to learn more about maintaining size and strength during Ironman Training, check out my article, “Can you finish an Ironman without losing muscle?” LINK HERE
Now, hopefully, you’ve noticed that I gave ranges. There are two reasons for this. First, all of this varies tremendously from individual to individual. You’ll need to experiment to see where you’re at. If you are doing too much, you won’t be able to recover, which means you’ll stop making progress, and you’ll start noticing nagging pains. If you do too little, you will progress very slowly or not at all.
Second, there’s a fairly large target here. The top end of the range will give you the quickest results while the bottom end of the range will give you the slowest results.
How to Calculate Training Volume for Your Arms
How much do pull ups, bench press and rows stimulate your upper arms? Which exercises target which muscles?
The big lifts provide a lot of arm training. In fact, there have been several studies that looked at the effects of adding arm isolation training to a program of big multi-joint lifts. Generally, the difference in size and strength after 8-10 weeks is limited. So as we look at building a biceps and triceps training program, we’ll need to look first at the role of the big lifts.
Back and Biceps Training Volume: To train your back and lats, I usually recommend a relatively even mix of vertical pulls (chins or lat pull downs) and horizontal pulls (bent over rows). Most vertical pulls are going to fully stimulate your biceps, while horizontal pulls are going to partially train your biceps.
So suppose you do 5 sets of vertical pulls and 5 sets of horizontal pulls per week. That’s a total of 10 sets of back work. And you’re training your biceps with the equivalent of roughly 6 sets.
Chest and Triceps Training Volume: To train your chest and front delts, I typically program a combination of horizontal presses, chest flys, and maybe some dips. Chest flys provide zero tricep stimulus. Dips hit all three heads effectively, and horizontal presses effectively train the medial and lateral heads. Thus a program with 4 sets of presses, 3 sets of flys and 3 sets of dips will total 10 sets of chest and front delt work. Meanwhile, the triceps long head will get 3 sets and the medial and lateral triceps heads will get 7 sets.
Don’t worry. If that’s too confusing, I’ll show you a simple way to put it all together below.
3 Training Templates for Bigger, Stronger Arms
In practice, here’s how you might use everything you’ve just learned.
Total Newbies: Newbie gains are a real thing, and you probably don’t need to worry about arm isolation work. Focus first on getting really good at the big multi-joint lifts. Once you know them inside and out and have been training consistently for a few months, try adding some isolation work.
Skeptical? Research suggests that if one untrained guy trains the big pulling lifts, while another untrained guy just trains bicep curls, they will both grow their biceps at roughly the same pace.
Full Body Gains: Trying to suss out all the training volume of different exercises on a muscle by muscle basis can be tedious. To keep it simple, try a 2:1 formula. For every two sets of back work, include 1 set of biceps work. Similarly, for every 2 sets of chest work, include 1 set of triceps work.
If you train upper body 2x per week, your program might look something like this.
Specialization Training: If you’re an experienced lifter and committed to gaining maximum arm size, consider performing a specialization phase. This is especially useful if you have competing training interests or a busy schedule. (My arms are the result of a specialization phase that I completed in the break between two Ironman seasons.)
Here’s how it works.
Put your entire training program on maintenance: roughly 4-6 sets per muscle group per week. Then work your way up to 12-15 sets of arm training per week. You can start at 3 sets 3x per week and slowly add sets until you hit 15 sets. If you’re recovering well, you can even go past 15.
If you train upper body 3x per week, your program might look something like this.
Thanks for Reading!
This article is part of a series of articles to help fitness generalists build evidence-based hypertrophy programs. You can find the other articles in the series with the links below.
