The simplest way to maximise arm gains, according to a sports scientist

Your workouts include exercises like the bench press, shoulder press, bent over rows and supinated pull-ups – surely that’s enough to grow your biceps and triceps, right? While these exercises will most definitely hit these muscle groups, however, if your goal is to build biceps the size of bowling balls and triceps like horseshoes, then it may not be enough.

“If you want to really get bigger arms, it’s worth doing a bit more volume and a bit of direct work,” says Dr. Pak Androulakis-Korakakis in a recent YouTube video. By this, he means more isolation exercises, which target one specific muscle group, as opposed to compound exercises, which work multiple muscles.

You may think that means you need to add on a long list of additional bicep and tricep exercises to your routine, but you don’t. Dr Pak has shared two exercises that he says are the simplest way to grow your arms using minimal effective dose training.

“The concept of the minimum effective dose is the concept that revolves around you doing the least amount of work needed for a desired outcome,” he explains. “In our case, the least amount of work to get jacked arms.”

While he does point out that performing 4-6 sets of any bicep or tricep exercise per week, alongside all your other chest, shoulder, and back training is more than enough to cover you, he recommends two exercises in particular if you want to slightly optimise your gains.

The bayesian curl and tricep extension superset

The two exercises Dr Pak recommends is the Bayesian curl and the dumbbell tricep extension. But, rather than working through sets and reps of each exercise separately, he recommends supersetting them to help save time.

“Supersets have been shown to cause the same amount of muscle growth in trained lifters as straight sets in roughly 36-40% less time,” he says.

While you may be more familiar with the dumbbell tricep extension, the Bayesian curl is a bicep curl performed using the cable machines where the arm extends past the body, giving the biceps a really deep stretch.

“To set up the Bayesian curl, ideally you would make it so that the cable is much higher so you can get the most amount of tension in the stretch. However, as long as you don’t have it set to the lowest setting and you have it midway, wherever it feels comfortable, the stretch will be plenty.”

Dr Pak just says to limit shoulder movement and just focus on lifting the weight with your biceps.

The tricep extension he says is “an amazing exercise for your triceps that involves the long head of the tricep” – this is located on the back of the upper arm, and targeting it can help improve the thickness and overall size of your triceps. Just make sure to keep your elbows pointed towards the ceiling and your elbows relatively tucked the entire time.

“Do your Bayesian curls set, wait 20 seconds or so; do your overhead extensions, give it a couple of minutes until you're ready to perform your next superset, do four of those and you’re done for the week. That’s minimum effective dose for your arms ticked.”