High frequency/volume for lagging arms?

Physicskid9

Has anyone had success bringing up a lagging body part by drastically increasing the volume/frequency with which they train it for a mesocycle or two?

Feel my arms are lagging behind the rest of my body. I understand progressive overload and the need to be in a caloric surplus btw just curious to hear some anecdotes.

Black Sheep

My arms are not massive but I've made steady progress.

Direct arm training with isolation work on upper body days is a given, but I do a fair bit of high volume other upper body work that involves the triceps to a large degree and that has helped a lot. Dips, sets of push-ups and sometimes I'm even doing a main lift bench variation that kills the triceps like pin benching or some other kind of end range of motion training. All of that added up, and I feel like a bigger tricep accounts for a lot of of any added mass that makes an arm look bigger. Whereas maybe people have a tendency to think bigger arms is all about training the biceps...

For the bicep there is a corollary to the tricep stuff I mention above. I personally don't do it because I have an issue with recurring elbow tendinitis, but someone doing a lot of palms in / supinated chin ups might see that help bicep growth alongside their bicep isolation work.

After that, for the isolation work itself, all the usual stuff applies: Strict form, full range of motion, and there is in my view a case to be made for mixing up your approach. I do heavy curls in the 6-10 rep range, and heavy lying tricep extensions, but I also do really high rep, high volume work and sometimes use protocols like rest pause and similar. I do think that whatever you're doing for accessories like this then there is a good case to be made for going close or too failure. If it's three isolation sets at the end of an upper body workout then you better really go for it, and journal what you're doing, and try to progress it somehow.

Physicskid9

Black Sheep wrote: »

My arms are not massive but I've made steady progress.

Direct arm training with isolation work on upper body days is a given, but I do a fair bit of high volume other upper body work that involves the triceps to a large degree and that has helped a lot. Dips, sets of push-ups and sometimes I'm even doing a main lift bench variation that kills the triceps like pin benching or some other kind of end range of motion training. All of that added up, and I feel like a bigger tricep accounts for a lot of of any added mass that makes an arm look bigger. Whereas maybe people have a tendency to think bigger arms is all about training the biceps...

For the bicep there is a corollary to the tricep stuff I mention above. I personally don't do it because I have an issue with recurring elbow tendinitis, but someone doing a lot of palms in / supinated chin ups might see that help bicep growth alongside their bicep isolation work.

After that, for the isolation work itself, all the usual stuff applies: Strict form, full range of motion, and there is in my view a case to be made for mixing up your approach. I do heavy curls in the 6-10 rep range, and heavy lying tricep extensions, but I also do really high rep, high volume work and sometimes use protocols like rest pause and similar. I do think that whatever you're doing for accessories like this then there is a good case to be made for going close or too failure. If it's three isolation sets at the end of an upper body workout then you better really go for it, and journal what you're doing, and try to progress it somehow.

Good points. Yeah started tracking everything now, obviously would of known what reps i was achieving on main lifts etc but it's harder to remember whether you got 8 or 9 reps on your 3rd set of biceps curls last week.

Cill94

More work will equal more growth as long you can recover from it. Upping the frequency is an easy way of spreading the volume out. I increased my pull-up strength by over 30% a couple years ago by working up to doing them every day.

I would avoid a drastic increase though, as that tends to make developing an overuse injury more likely. If you currently train arms twice per week then try going to three days, not five.