Your Arms Aren’t Just for Showing Off Your Guns

Arms aren’t just something that we use to show how much fire power we have, but they also are something that we use in daily activity and are pretty common in some exercises that you do in the gym. For example, when bench pressing, the triceps are the secondary muscle group that allow you to push the bar the last few inches at the top of your repetition.  The biceps are also the secondary muscle group that assist in chin-ups (Note:  Your palms face toward you with a chin-up grip, whereas your palms face away from your body when performing pull-ups.)

According to (Schuler and Mejia 15), “Your triceps are the muscles that help your arms straighten.” Imagine if you were to extend your elbows out as hard as you possibly can (I say imagine because you could hyperextend your elbow by doing this), you might feel a strong amount of tension behind you arm, that is because you are engaging the triceps muscle and are really flexing the triceps. Whereas when you take your fingers and try to touch your shoulders, you are really engaging the biceps.  The biceps do the opposite of what the triceps do, and according to (Schuler and Mejia 15), “The biceps serve as the muscle that help the motion of the shoulders and the elbow joints.”

Exercises to strengthen the Triceps and Biceps:

The most basic and the one that people probably do the most to build their biceps, is the bicep curl. It’s also one of the more common exercises that I see people do where people overload themselves with too much weight. I mean you’re not helping yourself by overloading yourself with too much weight, you just need to give your muscle time to develop and gain strength.

Proper way to do a Bicep Curl:

1. Grab a dumbbell, E-Z curl bar, or barbell with your arms fully extended and palms facing away from your body.

2. Slowly raise the dumbbell or bar by curling at your elbows (you’ll know if you have too much weight because you will have to use momentum to get the weight up).

3. Slowly lower the weight back down to the starting position to complete one repetition.

4. Repeat steps two and three 10 times.

A good exercise for your triceps are tricep curls (Skull Crushers). This exercise can be done with an E-Z bar or dumbbells. This is a very good exercise to isolate your triceps, and whenever I do it I get the feeling of blood immediately rushing into the muscle.

 
Proper way to do Skull Crushers:

1. Remove the E-Z bar from the rack. 

2. Bring bar out above your face.

3. Bend at your elbows until the bar goes behind your face.

4. Slowly begin to bring bar back to original position.

5. Repeat steps 2 through 4 ten times.