How often should I train my arm muscles to make them bigger and stronger? Many novice and advanced fitness enthusiasts and bodybuilders seem to think that they should train their arms as often as possible, preferably every workout, and that they will then quickly become larger. Not so.
What is the best way to train your arms?
Additionally, as a fitness enthusiast, you often encounter misunderstanding about your training and nutrition from your immediate environment. How should you deal with that?
How Often Should I Train My Arms
I’ve been training for a few years, but my arms aren’t really improving. Maybe I don’t train them enough?
In my environment, I also hear that I train too much (six times a week).
Answer
You say you think you might be training them too little. You don’t mention how often and with how many bicep and tricep exercises and sets you train your arms, but arms usually aren’t trained too little. More likely, too much. I see some people train their arms every day, apparently assuming that their arms will grow faster.
Your arms are relatively small muscles, and too much training will cause them to become overtrained and not grow anymore, and they may even become smaller.
Don’t forget that your arms get trained when you train other muscle groups. If you train your back muscles, your biceps get a good workout. If you train your chest and shoulders, your triceps also have a lot to endure.
Perhaps you’re making your arms do too much and not giving them enough rest, and that’s why they’re lagging behind. Take a good look at your schedule, and see if you’re not overdoing it, causing your arm muscles not to grow as well.
I recommend not training any muscle group more than twice a week. That means in your case, you divide your entire body over three days, and you do that twice to fill your six days.
Organize the schedule cleverly so that your arms get some rest during the week. In your case – training six times a week – I would make the following schedule:
Day 1 and 4: back, biceps
Day 2 and 5: chest, shoulders, triceps
Day 3 and 6: legs and calves
In this schedule above, your biceps and triceps get two days of rest before being trained directly again.
If you train four days a week, you could use this schedule:
Day 1 and 3: legs, back, biceps
Day 2 and 4: chest, shoulders, triceps
For your biceps and triceps, don’t do more than three exercises of between three and five sets, and keep the number of repetitions between 8 and 15.
For your triceps, you can do one or two more sets than for your biceps. Your triceps are larger and need more work to grow.
Training Too Much
Regarding the comments from your surroundings that you train too much:
We’ve probably all heard these comments before… “You train a lot. It’s not good for you, you know!”.
I advise you not to listen too much to your surroundings. Your surroundings usually have no idea what you’re doing, what you have to do to achieve something, usually don’t train themselves, and can’t understand that other people do something passionately.
If you want to see good results, you have to work hard for it. For you, that might mean training six times a week, for someone else three times or maybe four or five times.
Make sure that training doesn’t dominate your whole life. It’s just a sport, not your career, and for most people, it never will be. You wouldn’t be the first to put everything aside for the sport and get into trouble because of it.
Furthermore, it’s obviously up to you to decide what you do.
How often do you train your arms? What works best for you? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
