How to Get Bigger Arms: Biceps and Triceps Training That Works

The short answer

How to get bigger arms: train the triceps overhead rather than only at your side, pick curl variations that stretch the biceps, run 10 to 20 hard sets per arm muscle per week across two sessions, and make the weight or the reps climb over months. The triceps is the bigger of the two muscles, so it deserves at least as much work as the biceps.

Everything below is the detail. If you take one thing from this page, take the overhead triceps work, because it is the change with the largest measured effect and almost nobody does it.

One framing worth fixing before you start: to build arm muscle you need a lift whose numbers go up, not a routine with more exercises in it. Arm size follows the load on a handful of movements, over months.

The triceps is most of your arm

The biceps gets the attention and the triceps carries the size. It is the larger of the two muscles, it has three heads to the biceps' two, and its long head is the biggest single piece of the upper arm.

This matters for exercise selection more than it does for ego. The long head is the only part of the triceps that crosses the shoulder, which means it is the only part whose length changes when you move your arm relative to your torso. Put your arm overhead and the long head is stretched. Keep it at your side and it is not. That one fact drives the rest of this guide.

Do you even need direct arm work?

Less obviously than the internet suggests, and the honest answer is worth having before you build a program around curls.

Pressing does grow the triceps. Twenty-four men were split into a bench press group and a control group for ten weeks, with muscle cross-sectional area measured by MRI. The training group grew the pectoralis major, pectoralis minor, anterior deltoid and triceps brachii more than controls. The pec major grew more than the triceps did, but the triceps grew (Lanza et al., Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, 2024).

Adding isolation on top has repeatedly failed to beat compounds alone in trials. Twenty-nine untrained men did either lat pulldown and bench press, or the same two lifts plus elbow flexion and extension, for ten weeks. Elbow flexor thickness rose in both groups (6.5% vs 7.04%) with no difference between them (Gentil et al., Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, 2013). The same design was run on twenty trained men for eight weeks, and again found no additional benefit from the single-joint work (de França et al., Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, 2015).

Do not over-read that. These are small studies, eight to ten weeks long, and a trial with ten people per group cannot detect the size of difference that actually matters to a lifter over a year. Failing to find a difference is not the same as showing there is none.

The practical reading: compound pressing and pulling build a real base of arm size, so if your arms are lagging the first question is whether your bench, row and chin-up numbers have moved at all in six months. Direct arm work is how you add arm-specific volume cheaply once they have. It is an addition to hard compound training, not a replacement for it.

The change with the largest measured effect: go overhead

If you train triceps with pushdowns and nothing else, this is the section that will change your results.

Twenty-one adults trained both arms on a cable machine doing elbow extensions from 90 to 0 degrees, ten reps, five sets, twice a week, for twelve weeks. One arm worked overhead, the other with the upper arm at the side. Loads climbed equally in both. The overhead arm gained:

• 1.5 times more long head volume: +28.5% against +19.6%
• 1.4 times more lateral and medial head volume: +14.6% against +10.5%
• 1.4 times more whole triceps volume: +19.9% against +13.9%

That happened even though the overhead arm was lifting 34 to 39% less absolute weight throughout (Maeo et al., European Journal of Sport Science, 2023).

Two things follow. Overhead extensions belong in your program, not as a finisher but as the main triceps movement. And the lighter weight on them is not a sign that they are working less; in this trial it went with more growth, not less.

This was one study on twenty-one people, comparing two positions of one exercise. It is not a reason to delete pushdowns, which load the short position well and let you handle more weight. It is a reason to stop making them the only thing you do.

Curl variation decides where the biceps grows

The same logic runs down the front of the arm. Sixty-three young women did eight weeks of either preacher curls or incline curls. The preacher curl produced greater growth at the distal end of the elbow flexors, nearer the elbow. The incline curl, which puts the biceps on stretch at the shoulder, produced greater growth at the proximal end, nearer the shoulder (Kassiano et al., International Journal of Sports Medicine, 2025).

Neither won outright. They grew different parts of the same muscle. The useful conclusion is to run one of each rather than three variations of the same position, which is what most arm days accidentally do.

The exercise list

Every exercise below exists in GymEvo's library, with the equipment options shown in brackets.

Triceps

Biceps

The brachialis sits underneath the biceps, so building it makes the arm look bigger from the side even though you never see it. Hammer curls are the cheapest way to train it.

Sets, reps and rest

• Weekly sets: 10 to 20 hard sets per muscle, so 10 to 20 for biceps and 10 to 20 for triceps, split across two sessions. Count the triceps work you get from pressing as roughly half a set each. Use the training volume calculator to see where you actually are.
• Reps: 6 to 10 on the heavier compound work, 8 to 15 on isolation. Arms tolerate higher reps well, and heavy skull crushers are a common source of elbow pain.
• Effort: one to two reps in reserve on isolation. Arms are small and recover fast, so this is a reasonable place to train hard. How close to failure should you train has the detail.
• Rest: 90 seconds is enough between isolation sets. How long to rest between sets covers why cutting it shorter costs you reps.

An eight-week progression

Double progression: hold the weight until you hit the top of the rep range on every set, then add the smallest increment available and start again at the bottom of the range.

A realistic arm session inside that: overhead triceps extensions, pushdowns, incline curls, hammer curls. Twice a week, four exercises, three to four sets each, which lands you at 12 to 16 weekly sets per muscle. How much weight to add and when covers the increment; on arms it is usually the smallest plate you own.

How to get bigger arms at home

The pushing side transfers well. Eighteen men trained for eight weeks with either bench presses or push-ups at a matched load of roughly 40% of bench press one-rep max, twice weekly. Both groups increased bench press strength and triceps and pectoralis major thickness. Only the bench press group gained biceps thickness (Kikuchi and Nakazato, Journal of Exercise Science and Fitness, 2017).

That last detail is the whole problem with home arm training in one line: push-ups cover the triceps, nothing bodyweight covers the biceps unless you can hang from something.

Triceps at home, from GymEvo's library: Diamond Push Up, Triceps Extension Push Up, Bench Dips, Dips and Straight Bar Dips if you have parallel bars or rings, and Close Grip Bench Press if you own dumbbells.

Biceps at home: Chin Up is the one that matters, and a doorway bar is the cheapest piece of equipment in this guide. Without a bar you need resistance bands or dumbbells, because there is no bodyweight movement that loads elbow flexion properly.

Progressing without plates: add reps to the top of the range, then move to a harder variation (knee push-up to push-up to diamond to deficit to one-arm progressions), then add load with a backpack. Progressive overload with bodyweight and calisthenics covers the sequencing, which matters more at home than in a gym because the jumps between variations are large.

What to track

Arm growth over eight weeks is a few millimetres. You will not see it, and a tape measure around a pumped arm after a session will tell you whatever you want to hear.

Track the work instead. If your incline curl went from 12 kg for 8 to 14 kg for 11 over two months, the arm is bigger, whatever the mirror says on a given morning. GymEvo's free tier stores weight, reps and RPE per set and shows last session's numbers next to the set you are about to do, so the comparison happens during the workout rather than afterwards. Estimated one-rep max per exercise is charted free over your whole history. See how GymEvo handles progressive overload.

If you would rather measure, do it cold, first thing, same spot on the arm, once a month.

Common mistakes

• Pushdowns as the only triceps exercise. The long head is the largest part of the muscle and pushdowns train it in its shortest position. Go overhead.
• Five curl variations that all do the same thing. Barbell, dumbbell, cable and machine curls in the same elbow position are one exercise with four handles. Vary the shoulder position instead.
• Cutting the bottom of the rep. The stretched portion is where the growth evidence points. Swinging out of it to add weight trades the useful part for a bigger number.
• Training arms hard the day before pressing. Fatigued triceps cost you bench press reps, which cost you the compound stimulus that was building the arms in the first place.
• Adding arm volume while eating at maintenance. More sets without more calories is a recovery problem, not a growth plan. How to bulk up without getting fat covers the surplus.
• Judging it weekly. Give this eight weeks and compare logged numbers, not mirrors.

A note on elbows: skull crushers, heavy overhead work and high-rep pushdowns are common sources of elbow pain, and pain that persists past a session or two is a reason to change the exercise rather than train through it. This page is general training education, not individual medical advice.