What's The Right Amount of Arm Training? Can Compound Exercises Be Enough?

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What's The Right Amount of Arm Training? Can Compound Exercises Be Enough?

Today we are going to talk about arm training. Everybody likes the big guns and secretly I think everyone would like have bigger guns. But when it comes to overall fitness and our goals where should arm training fit in?

You may have heard it said, that you don’t need to do direct arm work. Your arms will grow just from heavy compound movements like bench press and rows.

Many athletes, including strength athletes don’t do much in the way of direct arm training. They are already training quite extensively and their time is better spent focused on movements that will improve sport performance. Leaving little extra time for anything else but recovery.

Most of us aren’t training for a specific sport, but our time is still valuable. So when we are training we want to get the most out of the time spent. A lot of us are working on our fitness because we want to improve our body composition, build some muscle and live longer more active lives.

Improving our body composition will allow our lives to be active longer. And when it comes to weight training there is no better exercises to improve body composition than compound movements. They burn more calories, gives our metabolism and hormone system a boost and builds more muscle that any other exercise. So when we first start exercising, theses should be the focus of our program. Now in the 3 training splits I have posted so far on this channel, compound movements have always been emphasized. So of the 19 to 24 sets per workout only 3 to 4 sets per workout are for arms.

So why train arms at all? It is true that they do get worked through these compound movements and will experience some growth because of it.

At first and especially if you have a lot of weight to lose. Arm training should not be the focus of your workouts and if you find that you don’t have the energy to complete all your exercises you are better off doing all the compound lifts, then working on the large muscle groups before worrying about arm training. That doesn’t mean that there is no reason to train arms as doing some arm training will help to insure they don’t become a weak link in your compound lifts.

While our first priority when deciding to improve our body composition, may have been health. There is no denying that there is an aesthetic element to it. We’ve been training hard making gains and we want to look good. And as always there is a genetic element too. While one guy builds massive arms just using compound movements another might not be so blessed. In my own case, and I know I have mentioned it before, but my triceps have always been good an kept pace with the rest of my physique. When it comes to my biceps now that is a different story and they are benefiting from the increased arm work I have been giving them lately.

So as we progress with our training and we see ourselves getting fitter and leaner with our waist size going down. We may start to see areas that we would like to improve on from an aesthetic side. We might start to see our chest is progressing faster than our back so we change our program to give our back greater emphasis. The same can be true with our arms except we can’t prioritize them the same way by just putting them first in our workouts as once our arms are exhausted we won’t be able to properly train the rest of our upper body. Now we could give them their own day but that is one more day at the gym and we either have to have a rest day or a lower body day afterwards to allow for recovery. We can add a few more sets to the end of our workout, but really after already doing a full training program are we going to have the energy to give our all to these last sets.

Next week I will be doing another 4 day training split based on science showing us the best way to build our arms without sacrificing anymore time or emphasize on other body parts. But until then keep working out while having fun,