If one of your fitness goals is to build stronger and bigger arms, you need to be doing biceps and triceps exercise regularly. These are the main muscle groups in the upper arms, and tend to benefit most from isolation exercises that target them directly.
The most common of these that you’ll see in the gym is biceps curls, but that’s not one of the four moves recommended by personal trainer Jeremy Ethier as part of his ultimate four-move arms workout, which you can see on his YouTube channel.
Ethier says he used to primarily do biceps curls and triceps pushdowns to target his arms, but when he adjusted his training to do the four moves in the workout below, he found them more effective. To do the workout you need several bits of equipment including access to a preacher bench, cable machine and free weight, so it’s one that’s best done in the gym.
If you’re at home you can use a set of the best adjustable dumbbells to recreate the workout and target the biceps and triceps, or try this 10-move dumbbell arms workout instead.
Watch Jeremy Ethier’s 4-move arm workout
Ethier goes into great detail in the video on the muscles in your biceps and triceps and the key things you need to do to train them effectively, referencing studies that indicate the best techniques to build muscles. He uses the preacher bench and dumbbells for both biceps exercises in the workout, and a cable machine for the two triceps exercises.
For each of the four moves, Ethier recommends doing three to four sets, doing eight to 12 reps for the biceps moves and 10-15 sets for the triceps moves. He suggests adding the moves to your other workouts throughout the week, or doing them all at once if you have a specific arm workout day.
The fact you’re targeting the biceps and triceps directly with the exercises means that you can feel if you’re engaging them correctly with each move, and adjust your form if you’re not. Move slowly and with control for each rep, and listen to what Ethier says about challenging the muscles when they’re stretched — at the bottom position of a preacher curl, for example.
It’s best to start off with fairly light weights for this session, especially with the triceps exercises, because the fairly high amount of sets and reps means that you’ll quickly exhaust the muscles involved if you’re doing the moves correctly.
This is a great workout if your goal is to strengthen your upper arms in particular, but you’re keen to do more of a full-body session then try this 8-move dumbbell workout. You could even add on a couple of the moves from Ethier’s session at the end to add more focus to your arms while still training the whole body.
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