Originally Posted by
gmantheman
It was Charles Poliquin that stated the 15LBS=1 inch. Here are some excerpts.
Bob Hoffman in 1939: "Big arms are generally the result of all around training. A moderate amount of specializing in arm development should be sufficient to bring them to outstanding size, strength, and proportions.
You could not expect to use a Mack truck tire on a Ford or other light car. Neither could you expect to build a 17-inch arm upon a 120-pound body. It's essential that a bigger body be built, so that bigger arms may be obtained."
Charles Poliquin in 2000: "A good rule of thumb is that for every inch you want to gain on your arms, you need to gain roughly 15 pounds of equally distributed body mass. In other words, to make significant improvements in your arms, you have to gain mass all over your entire body.
The human body is a finely-tuned machine that will only allow for a certain amount of asymmetry. Therefore, if you devote your training energies solely to building big arms, you'd eventually reach a point of total stagnation because you weren't training your legs."
The Lesson: First of all, if some part of you doesn't think it's awesome when a cute girl hangs onto your muscular arm as you walk into a room together, you're a low-down filthy liar. The trouble is that some guys want the arms without "big, bulky thighs" or "wide lats that don't fit comfortably into Affliction T-shirts."
I hate to break the news to you boy-men, but with big arms comes a big body. Anything else will leave you looking like a shaved chimpanzee, with a likely training-IQ to match.
Secondly, in the "incredibly unlikely" event that somebody thinks they just read "don't train arms to get big arms," you can put your head down and take a nap. The grown-ups are talking.
What I'm saying, and what Hoffman, Poliquin, and plenty of other coaches are saying, is that in order to get your arm size into the high teens (or upwards of 45cm for my Euro brothers), you've got to be doing specific biceps and triceps work in addition to putting plenty of time and energy into squats, deadlifts, and other big exercises.
That might seem like common sense for more experienced lifters, but common sense is a rare commodity in the 15-to-22 year old gym member demographic. These are kids whose idea of lifting heavy involves quarter-rep shrugs with 30 pounds less than their bodyweight, but they're exactly the guys who need to be deadlifting, rowing, and pressing more often than they hit the incline hammer curls and overhead one-arm cable extensions.
Hoffman couldn't have said it more plainly: You can't build a 17-inch arm on a 120-pound body. To build significantly bigger arms than you've got right now, you need to build a larger complete body, and the fastest path there requires a training plan that gives plenty of attention to the big lifts while also giving some attention to direct arm work, not the other way around.
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