How To Build Big Ass Arms Old School Style

“Big Arms; Might as Well Look the Part”

“Big arms; might as well look the part.”

Hugh Cassidy

Bill Pearl, shown in the featured image circa 1966, had relaxed arms that looked better than most men’s flexed arms. His relaxed triceps looked like a mixed sack of bowling balls, baseballs, and golf balls. That photo made me redouble my triceps work.

My First Arm Workout and First Overtraining Lesson

In 1962 I was 12 years old. I found a 5-pound solid dumbbell in the yard next door to my grandmother’s East Arkansas truck farm. I decided that I would do sets of biceps curls every couple of hours, from dawn to dusk. I likely did 500 cumulative curls for each arm with that 5-pound dumbbell that day. The next day I awoke with involuntarily contracted biceps: both biceps were frozen, contracted, unable to relax. My hands were next to my shoulders and face. I could not straighten my arms more than four inches without excruciating pain. My 80-year-old grandmother was baffled by my condition and my explanation.

My younger brother and my cousin Joey quickly figured out that I was helpless as a trussed chicken. They would gleefully sneak up, leap out, and pull down on my frozen arms like slot machine handles. The pain jolt would cause me to yelp and spastically scramble away, tripping over things in my haste to escape. The sensation was akin to being hooked up to a car battery and repeatedly shocked by torturers. No doctors or sympathy for Marty.

Ride it out. I would flee my tormentors, running away when I detected a sneak attack. Running frantically with hands frozen next to my face made me look like a crazed ostrich. They laughed when they inflicted the pain and they laughed when I ran away. It took three days for my arms to normalize. I then instituted a reign of terror; it was retribution and payback time. I also learned a valuable lesson about overtraining.

Old Muscle-Mag Arm Heroes

I have trained my arms my whole life. That is a bit of an exaggeration. I started at age 11. My earliest idealized male role models were mythological gods and comic book heroes: Zeus, Hercules, Jupiter, Apollo, Odin, Thor, Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, Aqua Man, Flash — even Robin had a great physique with sculpted muscles and good arms.

I started reading the muscle mags, Strength & Health from Hoffman and York, Muscle Builder from the Weider Brothers, and Iron Man from Peary Rader in Nebraska, in 1962. My earliest muscle-mag big-arm heroes were Reg Park with his baseball biceps, Bill Pearl for his incredible relaxed arms, Freddy Ortiz’s freaky peaked biceps, Larry Scott’s great flexed biceps, Leroy Colbert’s incredible baseball biceps, and Sergio Oliva with his ham-hock 20-inch arms that had no peak. All this before Arnold took over with his incredible peaked biceps in the 1970s.

Three Old-School Lessons About Big Arms

What have I learned training arms for sixty years?

• First: if you want big arms, you must train them, biceps and triceps, on a regular and repeated basis.
• Second: there is an exercise hierarchy among arm exercises. Not all arm exercises are created equal. Some are indispensable. Some are superfluous.
• Third: there is a strong relationship between arm size and quality bodyweight. To grow big arms, you must be prepared to add useful bodyweight.

A 150-pound man with 15-inch arms will not realistically develop 17-inch arms, much less 18-inch arms, while staying at a 150-pound bodyweight. This inconvenient truth — to grow larger arms requires adding quality bodyweight — is ignored by many arm-training fanatics.

It makes no sense to spend an inordinate amount of time training for big arms unless the arm work is done in conjunction with a mass-building phase. Without enough energy, protein, recovery and progressive training, arm work becomes maintenance at best.

Arm Size and Quality Bodyweight

The way to improve arm size is to train the hell out of your arms while eating copious clean calories and slowly, methodically, adding quality bodyweight. The Arnold-era rule of thumb was this: to increase arm size by one inch, a man needed to add ten pounds of lean muscle mass. Treat that as an old-school rule of thumb, not a guaranteed formula. Lean muscle mass is not marbled with an unacceptable amount of body fat.

Arm Gods, 1964: Freddy Ortiz and Larry Scott stand in front of Vince Gironda’s Hollywood Gym. Freddy had 19-inch arms and a 29-inch waist.

What is the sense of adding ten pounds of muscle if it is accompanied by ten pounds of body fat? If the arm-builder has a terrible diet, if he takes in additional calories needed to fuel and trigger growth from dirty calories — pizza, beer, ice cream, pie, and donuts — then guess what? Weight gain will contain an unacceptable amount of body fat. No kidding.

Earn the Right to Specialize

The smart way to get big arms is this: first, lean out and clean up the diet. The overweight and out-of-shape need to tighten up first. Get fit first. After a protracted 10- to 12-week lean-out phase, the now-fit trainee has earned the right to go on a mass-building regimen coupled with a body-part specialization program, in this case, an arm specialization program.

This ancient strategy — specialize and slam quality calories — is designed to add serious arm size in 10 to 12 weeks. The ambitious old-school target is to add a full inch to a man’s arm, accompanied by a meaningful increase in lean muscle mass. This specialization strategy has been used since the 1950s. Train the targeted lagging muscle like your life depended on it. Slam protein, fiber, and quality starch carbohydrates. Nudge the scale upward one pound at a time, no more, no less.

Hugh Cassidy, Bill Pearl, and the Arm Standard

When I trained under world powerlifting champion Hugh Cassidy, he always had us finish every workout with biceps / triceps work.

“Might as well look the part,” he would say.

He and I saw Bill Pearl at a York Barbell picnic in 1968. Hugh, already a stud, was impressed. “That Bill Pearl, he sure looked great when he was walking around the York picnic in a tee-shirt.” Pearl’s relaxed triceps looked like a mixed sack of bowling balls, baseballs, and golf balls. Hugh had a similar reaction years later when we met Roger Estep. “Did you see the way his arms and forearms rippled as he ate that apple?!”

The smart trainee leans out, reduces body fat, and becomes as fit as possible before embarking on a mass-building / arm-specialization program. Asking an individual eating a bad diet to add size is an express train to excess body fat and poor conditioning. No bulking up for the already overweight and out of shape. You must earn the right to embark on a mass-building phase.

Anytime the goal is to bring up a lagging body part, the goal is to increase muscle size. How can you increase a muscle’s size and not add bodyweight? How can you add bodyweight if you do not take in a surplus of quality nutrients? You need to eat enough and drink enough to support the body-shattering resistance training it takes to bring up an undersized, weak body part.

Sergio Oliva, 1966: is having arms bigger than your head disproportional? Seeing this photo made me redouble my already redoubled triceps work.

If the additional nutrients are clean fuel, if cardio is done, if training is hard and progressive, weight gain can be predominantly muscle. The good news is that lagging body parts subjected to effective training and appropriate nutrition can respond quickly. The optimal mass-building phase is preceded by a successful lean-out phase. What do you do when it is time to pull the trigger on an old-school commonsense arm-specialization program?

Old-School Arm Specialization Programming

Optimally, when specializing, the arms are trained twice weekly, at opposite ends of the training week. Here is a classical power-bodybuilding arm training split. The arms are trained twice weekly with a different training menu in each weekly session.

Tuesday Arm Exercises

1. Standing barbell cheat curl
2. Dips
3. Seated dumbbell curls
4. Single overhead dumbbell triceps press
5. Preacher curl
6. Triceps pushdowns

Friday Arm Exercises

1. Steep incline dumbbell curls
2. Nose-breakers with EZ-curl bar
3. 90-degree spider curls or single-dumbbell concentration curls
4. Overhead French press on Smith machine
5. Cable curls
6. Cable pushdowns using rope handles

Rules for the 10-Week Arm Specialization Phase

• Biceps and triceps are super-setted and alternated: set of biceps, set of triceps, rest, repeat.
• Make the mind-muscle connection. Poundage is secondary; feel and contraction are primary.
• Use three, four or five sets per exercise. Add poundage each set. Use one or two top sets. Stronger trainees need more warm-up sets.
• On barbell and dumbbell exercises, keep reps in the 5- to 8-rep range.
• Dips are done both weighted and unweighted, if the shoulders and elbows tolerate them.
• Cable exercise reps are done in the 8- to 12-rep range using continuous tension.
• Exercises can and should be switched out every 4 to 6 weeks.
• The fit athlete seeks to add one pound of bodyweight per week for ten straight weeks. Ten pounds and one additional inch of arm size is the old-school target, not a guarantee.
• Each successive week, the slightly larger athlete squeezes out another rep or two, or increases the poundage slightly, without degrading exercise form.
• Progress is coaxed. Small weekly gains deposit the trainee at the predetermined destination.
• Train arms after chest training on day one. Train arms again, using different exercises, two to three days later after blasting shoulders.

Nutrition for Bigger Arms

Precision nutrition refuels and heals workout-battered muscles. The fit athlete makes expert use of regular food to create an anabolic environment. Anabolism is supported by hard training, enough total calories, enough protein, enough carbohydrate to fuel training, and enough recovery to turn the punishment into progress.

After an intense training session, the body is primed to use nutrients. Take advantage and eat a real post-training meal or planned recovery feeding after crushing yourself in a high-intensity resistance-training session. Do not turn the “window of opportunity” into mystical nonsense. Total daily protein, total daily calories, food quality and consistency are what carry the day.

Building bigger arms requires a comprehensive approach. Without combining incredibly intense arm training with enough quality nutrients, the best you can hope for is to maintain whatever you have built. When it comes to adding arm size, revisit the old-school ways: first, get fit and earn the right to specialize. Add quality bodyweight slowly and methodically. Train your arms like your life depended on it. Hold the course for three months. Building bigger arms is the ultimate in old-school sophisticated simplicity.

RAW with Marty Gallagher, J.P. Brice, and Jim Steel Podcast.

About the Author: Marty Gallagher

As an athlete Marty Gallagher is a national and world champion in Olympic lifting and powerlifting. He was a world champion team coach in 1991 and coached Black's Gym to five national team titles. He's also coached some of the strongest men on the planet including Kirk Karwoski when he completed his world record 1,003 lb. squat. Today he teaches the US Secret Service and Tier 1 Spec Ops on how to maximize their strength in minimal time. As a writer since 1978 he’s written for Powerlifting USA, Milo, Flex Magazine, Muscle & Fitness, Prime Fitness, Washington Post, Dragon Door and now IRON COMPANY. He’s also the author of multiple books including Purposeful Primitive, Strong Medicine, Ed Coan’s book Coan, The Man, the Myth, the Method and numerous others. Read the Marty Gallagher biography here.