THE OG: Arms

If you want big biceps, train triceps

There's a trend towards building big arms today. This is fine as long as two provisos are followed. First, an arm should have a balanced development between the biceps and triceps. Second, a grossly overdeveloped arm matched with a pair of puny legs or underdeveloped shoulders looks ghastly. I abhor seeing arms that are out of proportion with the rest of the body. Get big by all means, but keep the the physique balanced. (WP, p.131)

Welcome back to the OG! We’re continuing our look at Vince Gironda’s approach to bodybuilding with another bodypart. This time, it’s the arms, and as always with Vince, balanced development and proportion are key principles to keep in mind at all times.

As the quotation above shows, Vince wanted the arms to be developed proportionally on both sides, which is to say, he didn’t want the triceps to outweigh the biceps, or vice versa. Likewise, he didn’t want a bodybuilder to be top-heavy, either. I get the sense he wouldn’t have been a fan of so-called “men’s physique” competition.

Larry Scott performing preacher curls, a Gironda signature for the biceps

We’ve already seen, in my piece “If you want big arms, train legs,” that Vince advocated incorporating leg work into arm training. He believed that a lifter could experience a 15% increase in arm size by simply doing leg work before training arms.

Vigorous and regular leg exercise is needed because muscle is developed only in relation to the amount of nerve force present. Leg work generates the greatest amount of nerve force of any single body part. (WP, p.131)

Vince doesn’t appear to have been working from any kind of specific study of the effects of leg work on smaller muscle groups that are trained directly after. It was just well established, even by the 1960s, that training your legs

Vince wasn’t working from specific research into the relationship between muscle growth and the training of limbs in isolation or conjunction. I think he was just putting 2+2 together on the basis of his wider reading and knowledge of exercise physiology. By Vince’s time it was already a long-standing belief that, if you want to pack muscle on your entire body, from your chest and shoulders to your arms and, of course, your legs, what you need to do is train your legs. That’s the basis of the famous “squats and milk” routine, which sees the lifter perform heavy 20-rep squat sets and drink a gallon or more of whole, preferably raw, milk a day. Vince had also trained a lot of people, and so I’m sure he witnessed this principle yielding results many, many times. (“If you want big arms, train legs”)

We had to wait until 2011 for a scientific study to provide vindication of Vince’s claims about the benefits of leg training for arms. A Norwegian study showed that the addition of simple leg exercises before arm training resulted in greater muscular growth, greater increase in strength and higher levels of circulating hormones.

While we’re here, there’s no reason to believe that these benefits wouldn’t translate to other smaller muscle groups like, for example, the shoulders. There’s no reason you couldn’t do some leg work before you train your shoulders.