Muscle Tips

by Pete Sisco

I’ve never seen a guy in a gym who wasn’t interested in putting another inch or two of size on his chest and arms. Over the years I’ve seen innumerable workouts offered that are supposed to do wonders for building a bigger chest or putting more muscle on a guy’s triceps or biceps. Most of them are a waste of time.

When I go into a gym and see guys working out I’m always amazed at all the mistakes being made and the time that is wasted. It’s criminal. I see some guys doing five or six chest exercises, followed by four or five exercises each for triceps and biceps. The weights they used vary all over the place. They do an inclined bench press with 200 pounds, then cable crossovers with 80 pounds then dumbbell flyes with 30 pounds in each hand.

Why?

Variation in exercise types is not a prerequisite for stimulating muscle growth. A guy who does ten chest exercises will not necessarily get better results than a guy who does two chest exercises. So why do ten? Those guys are just wasting their recovery capacity with busywork.

The same thing happens with arm exercises. Guys grind out set after set with barbells, dumbbells and machines, all with different weights. And the real tragedy with these guys is that when I ask them what measurable progress they’ve made in recent months they usually admit they have virtually nothing to show for their thousands of reps.

What Works

If you want muscle to grow bigger and stronger you have to literally force it to adapt. And muscle adapts to a very specific stress. It adapts to performing a great amount of work per unit of time. We shorten this concept to the single word, intensity. Unfortunately the word intensity is often misused in the gym. It is used loosely and without exact numbers attached to it. So a set of ‘intense’ barbell curls are considered about equal to ‘intense’ dumbbell curls.

But in the realm of science we use exact measurements in order to be more certain of what we are doing. In the interest of knowing what exercises really delivered the highest intensity I conducted a study that measured the intensity of common chest and arm exercises.

Over a period of several weeks subjects performed the most popular exercises and measurements were taken of how many total pounds per minute could be lifted. For example, subjects might have averaged 350 pounds per minute of biceps intensity performing dumbbell curls compared to averaging 890 pounds per minute performing barbell curls.

So once it’s established (and it is!) that dumbbell curls do not deliver the highest intensity to the target muscles, what would be the point of doing them? There isn’t one. It’s a waste of time and effort. Lower intensity exercises represent work that will only deplete your recovery ability but will not stimulate new muscle growth. All work done by the muscles of your body creates waste products that your organs need to process. So every low intensity exercise you do actually digs a deeper hole from which you need to recover. Every wasted rep decreases your ability to fully recover and then have new muscle manifest….if you even stimulated growth, which you likely didn’t.

The ‘Secret’ That Isn’t a Secret

So now I’ll tell you three secrets to getting the best possible results on your chest and arm workouts. But these secrets are something that any person can absolutely, positively verify in any gym. Don’t take my word for it. Test for yourself and you’ll discover these exercises will deliver the highest intensity of overload.

Chest: Place a barbell in a power rack or use a Smith machine so that it is already within your last four inches of reach. Load 50 to 100% more weight than you usually use. Using a shoulder width grip press the bar up one inch and hold it - without locking out - for a count of 5 seconds. If you can hold this weight for more than 5 seconds it’s too light and you should add more weight.

Biceps: Place a barbell in a power rack or use a Smith machine so that it is already within your last four inches of travel upward. Load 50 to 100% more weight than you usually use. Using a shoulder width grip curls the bar up one inch and hold it - without bringing up to the top, rest position - for a count of 5 seconds. If you can hold this weight for more than 5 seconds it’s too light and you should add more weight.

Triceps: Just as you did for the chest exercise, place a barbell in a power rack or use a Smith machine so that it is already within your last four inches of reach. Load 50 to 100% more weight than you usually use. Using a narrow grip with your hands 6 inches or less apart press the bar up one inch and hold it - without locking out - for a count of 5 seconds. If you can hold this weight for more than 5 seconds it’s too light and you should add more weight.

Focus your efforts on the specific exercises that will deliver the greatest intensity to your chest and arms. Space your workouts far enough apart that you make progress every workout and you’ll develop the biggest chest and arms you’ve ever had.