More than just Muscle

It’s now a few days after the New Year celebrations and gyms around the country are taking in the largest number of clients that they’ll probably see for the rest of the year. If you’re a regular gym goer like me this will probably be a pretty annoying time for you, the last thing you want is to be hanging around waiting for equipment to be freed up by people who won’t even be coming in a couple of weeks’ time worse still is seeing all the terrible techniques that people adopt thinking that they can just jump right in without any research or coaching. But before I start ranting I’ll keep this on topic.

[Man or woman biceps form a very visible part of your overall physique that stand out.]

I have spent many hours in the gym observing some crazy routines designed to build the biggest biceps known to man. The most popular exercise appears to be the bicep curl. While I know most of these people just want to stand in front of a mirror (a practice I would say hinders more often than helps any exercise) this won’t help you in your quest for the arms of your dreams.

So without further ado…… drum roll please…. the best exercise that you can do to build fantastic looking arms is: Chin-ups.

Chin-ups are one of my favourite all time exercises. They are one of the best exercises for not only your arms but also your shoulders and back. They are a compund exercise (meaning they use multiple muscles/joints to perform the exercise) and if you can knock out a few you will get people watching with amazement.

Chin-ups should be performed by using your lateral muscles in your back to pull yourself up to the ceiling so you’ll want to lean back ever so slightly. Performed poorly they actually become an arm-dominant exercise and your ability to perform even 1 will go down to almost nill.

[Performed properly the lateral muscles are the primary muscles worked, however they also have a huge impact on your biceps too!]

The great benefit of this exercise is that it can be performed almost anywhere with a high bar. You can use tree branches, the monkey bars in the local kid’s play park or get yourself a cheap bar and affix it to a doorway in your house.

To start with you’ll want to do as many as you can as often as you can, if you have a bar in a doorway just bang out a few everytime you go through. You’ll become very strong very fast and probably surprise yourself. To top it all off your arms will start to grow and combined with an effective diet you’ll see some great definition begin to appear.

After a while as your training progresses you can start including extra weight or do variations on the exercise to increase the difficulty. Most importantly have fun, the strength built with this exercise can be put to so many other uses.