Avoiding Mistakes When Training Your Arms

Some people use such herky-jerky form when they perform arm exercises that they look like people dancing under a strobe light. Keep the following tips in mind when training your arms:

• Don’t cheat. If you contort your whole body to lift the weight, you work your whole body, not your arms. Rocking back and forth is also a great way to throw out your lower back. Think about how you’ll feel explaining to your friends that you wrenched your back while exercising your arms.
• Don’t skip your wrists. Few people pine away for forearms the size of Popeye’s.
• Go easy on the elbows. Exercise captions throughout this chapter tell you to straighten your arms. This, however, doesn’t mean snapping your elbows into a fully straightened position.
• Keep your elbows still. When your elbows veer out to the side during many biceps and triceps exercises, you’re able to lift more weight. However, this is only because you have more leverage; your arms aren’t getting any stronger. When you’re doing biceps exercises such as the dumbbell reverse biceps curl, you may also have a tendency to pull your arms and elbows forward to lift the weight. You can’t avoid this extra movement completely, but keep it to a minimum.

Enjoying Strong Arms

Because we use our arms so often in daily life, we tend to take our arm muscles for granted. However, giving these muscles extra attention in the weight room really does pay off.

• Attaining real-life benefits: Your arms are the link between your upper body and the rest of the world. If your arms are weak, your larger, upper body muscles can’t work to full capacity. You’re only as strong as your weakest link. For example, the lat pulldown, a back exercise, mainly requires back strength, but weak biceps limit your ability to do this exercise. With stronger triceps, you can more effectively challenge your chest muscles in exercises such as the push-up or the bench press. Strong wrists are crucial for many weight lifting exercises and for activities outside of the gym: gripping a golf club, shelling peanuts, shuffling cards, or working at your computer keyboard without pain.
• Preventing injury: Strong arms help protect your elbows from harm. Carry around a heavy briefcase with a straight arm long enough and eventually your elbow starts to ache. With stronger arm muscles, you can haul that briefcase around longer without pain, and you’re less likely to get tennis elbow, which is inflammation of the elbow joint. Powerful arms also minimize your chances of soreness or injuries when you perform weight lifting exercises or when you lift a dumbbell, barbell, or weight plate off of a rack. Strong wrists, in particular, help you avoid carpal tunnel syndrome. Repetitive movements such as typing, scanning items at the grocery checkout, or operating the mouse of your computer can cause this painful and sometimes debilitating condition.
• The confidence factor: The feel-good factor: We tend to equate toned biceps with masculine strength. Popeye’s biceps are almost the size of his head. In women, the jury is still out. Popular opinion can’t come to a consensus on whether it prefers women with toned arms or weak arms. The bottom line is that strong arms help you to enjoy life better and toned muscles look healthy. Society’s judgment about whether men and women should have big or small muscles is likely to change with the winds of fashion, but being healthy and strong and feeling great are always positive.

Understanding Arm Muscle Basics

Your biceps muscle spans the front of your upper arm. Hang out in any gym and you’ll see people flexing these muscles in the mirror, usually when they think that nobody’s watching. The main job of your biceps (nicknamed your is or your guns) is to bend your arm; in gymspeak, this motion is called curling or flexing.
Your triceps, located directly opposite your biceps, spans the rear of your upper arm. The biceps and triceps, like many muscle groups, work together in pairs. When you squeeze your biceps, your triceps relaxes and your arm bends, and when you squeeze your triceps, your biceps relaxes and your arm straightens. Maintaining a good balance of strength in the relationship between the two muscles is important so that one muscle doesn’t dominate the other. That’s why you need to train both.
Another group of arm muscles allows your wrists to move in a variety of ways. To spare you some jargon, we’re going to refer to these as your wrist muscles. These muscles let you bend your wrist up, arch it down, twirl it in a circle, tilt it left and right, and turn your palm up or down. One of the most important jobs of the wrist muscles is to keep the wrist stable and the wrist joint flat or neutral. If your wrists are weak, the wrist muscles can bend at inopportune times (like when you’re holding a 100-pound barbell over your chest). Weak wrists also mean that you can’t get a grip — on a baseball bat, a stubborn weed, or a can of mushroom soup — and leave you prone to conditions like carpal tunnel syndrome, an inflammation of your wrist nerves.