I always had difficulty developing my triceps, and when I started training, we followed the idea of chest and triceps, back and biceps. In my head, if I created the relationship I had there, it would develop. As I trained, I realized that the chest developed OK, the shoulder developed OK, and the leg always developed well.
I wasn't doing so well with my arms, and my triceps, so, f*ck. . .
What's happening? As we believed at the time that for you to develop muscle, you had to pull loads, it was Coleman's time, we watched the guy train, and the thing was to put a ton on your legs. So we got together: we trained our chest and triceps, and put weight on.
Did you put weight on and your arm grew? More or less. Not the way I wanted.
My chest developed more, and my triceps were a bit toothless. I needed to do something to resolve this arm. Until then I was studying and understood which were the best exercises, and I understood which were the best exercises for each muscle.
At that time, we used electromyography a lot as a reference, and among the various exercises that are good for the triceps, one that stood out was the triceps forehead. Save this information. You combine this information with the idea, at the time, of lifting a lot of weight.
To grow, you have to load it up. You take the triceps test, add it with a lot of load and the time bomb has started. We'll talk about that in a little while.
I went there to look for a coach, guys who knew more about Paranauê than me. I met a guy who said to me like this: "Laércio, an arm is not a burden. An arm is a skill.
" When training your arms, you will use good loads as long as you have a very well-fitted and very technical movement. Mainly triceps, it is interesting to do movements that have a peak of contraction, so you can extract more tension from this muscle. I started putting this into practice.
I started training more consciously, correcting the exercises more, and I'll give you a very simple example. If you're going to do a triceps pulley and you're thinking about putting a lot of weight on, you'll naturally start to move your elbow away. If you've never noticed this, it's natural, your body does this on its own, it's light.
And the simple fact that you bring your elbow together here and keep that elbow as closed as you can greatly intensifies the work of the triceps because you are not dissipating the force vector. Here, I brought you just one little thing that I was correcting in my exercises and I felt like damn, I could no longer use the loads I used before. The loads decreased, and the training intensity increased, because I greatly increased my training awareness, doing it in a very technical way.
This changed the game for me because I started to feel my arm work more, and feel it develop more. But I still continued doing chest and triceps. One thing I started doing straight away was doing arm training on Saturday.
I did chest and triceps, back and biceps, and when I arrived on Saturday, I did arms. We even joked that it was training for partying. Arm, biceps and triceps training, you greatly increase the pump in your arm.
And we go to Waldemar Guimarães, who said that it's cool to do triceps and biceps, even in combination , because you maintain plasma flow in the arm, you maintain a greater blood volume. Today we have a study showing that muscle pump positively influences hypertrophy, and the bigger the pump, the bigger the muscle. At the beginning, it was loading and that was it.
It was chest and triceps. At the time we're talking about now, I didn't lift as much load, but I still used the exercises that the electromyography indicated, but I did it in a more technical, more conscious way, I put in a workout at the end of the week to precisely stimulate the arm. But the time bomb was still ticking, ticking, ticking.
After a while, coach goes and coach comes, coach here and coach there, a time came when another key turned. When a normal person trains, they follow a more standard training plan. When an athlete goes to do a workout, the proposal is to create a workout based on that athlete's deficiencies, emphasizing the muscles that this athlete wants to develop further, and this will lead to something that science today also proves.
What did I start doing? Prioritize triceps work. First, I trained triceps, because science also shows that the muscle you train first develops the most.
- Afterwards, could you train your chest? - It won't work. The triceps help the chest.
It's no longer chest and triceps. I switched, triceps and back, biceps and chest. Because I train triceps, I give it as much as I have, and then I train my back.
Biceps, same thing. In fact, I put the periodization of Muscle 60D this way. For people who want to develop their arms more, Muscle is perfect because it already comes with this feature.
And I started doing that, I started to feel that my arm started to develop a little more because of that too. At that moment, my triceps work started to appear more frequently during the week, not just two workouts, there was more stimulus for it. And then, if you're stimulating this muscle more, if you're training this muscle more, you're also wearing this guy out more.
A lot of work has to be done to optimize his recovery and hypertrophy. Then, one thing that absolutely cannot be missing is a load of protein that makes that muscle grow. Using whey protein is a very valuable strategy and makes life a lot easier.
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Go to the website and check out the LALA coupon. And now, remember the bomb? That was something I learned the hard way.
There are exercises that are very good for developing muscle. Exercises that activate this muscle a lot, but are also exercises that demand a lot from the joints. The triceps test, done for a long time, with a lot of load, after a while, even though I reduced the load on this test but continued to do it intensely, my elbow opened its mouth.
And today, I no longer do triceps tests at all because I can't do it, my elbow hurts. So, here comes a very big lesson for you. It's not that it will hurt you, but too much of it can hurt you.
Today, I look at the triceps test, I see it as a great exercise, but poor value for money , and if you do the triceps test and don't feel anything in the elbow, great, but don't overdo it. When we talk about joints, especially the cartilage that our joints have, we are talking about tissue that is not innervated. This means that you don't feel pain if you are hurting him.
It is not vascularized. There is not enough blood for him with nutrients for him to regenerate. It regenerates much more slowly.
We have a tissue that you don't feel pain if you hurt it, and you can recover it more slowly. In other words, you could be hurting your joints right now and not realizing it. When you start to feel pain, it's because that cartilage has already gone into space, and then you're really starting to hurt the bone.
- And then, you feel pain. But then it was gone. - My arm!
Don't overdo it, don't do it all the time, add it every now and then. It's a good exercise for your muscles, but it demands a lot from your elbow. So, when that happened, I said, "I need to select my exercises better.
" What you now know as the No Reps methodology started to emerge in my head, which is the idea of not training to lift the load, but rather training to activate the muscle, and of course, in No Reps we talk about not counting, but Not counting is also this in the methodology, because by not counting, you can direct your attention to things that are actually important. I started training more consciously, and I understood that the load, movement and exercise are tools for you to reach the end, which is to activate the muscle. Today, I bring all this together with a wiser choice of exercises, and when you are going to do triceps, it is interesting to keep in mind that this muscle that is on the back of your arm and especially the long head, it ends up acting in different ways depending on the angle of your shoulder.
If you have your arm down here, it is shorter. If you have your arm up here, it is more elongated. Here in the middle, he has a medium lengthening and shortening, and for you to have a perfect triceps workout, it is important that you go through this guy's 3 stretching ranges.
In my training there is always a triceps pulley, when the triceps are shortened. There is always an exercise at this angle, and you will remember the forehead curl. I don't do overhead barbells, but I do bench presses on the handle, at an angle, and it works really well.
Then, I can relieve the compression in my elbow. And there's also an exercise with it that's more elongated, and it could be French. You can do machine French, cable French, with dumbbells, unilateral, bilateral, and it is important to go through these 3 exercises to have a stimulus being applied to the muscle in different stretches.
We also recorded this video here, where I tell my story of what I did, what I learned to develop my biceps. So, complete it. You saw the triceps here, now you will see the biceps and you will have gigantic arms.
