Nifty Muscle Building Exercises for Your Arms
If you missed fitness expert, Nick Nilsson’s glute-firing exercise from the last interview excerpt, I highly recommend you head back to check it out. With just a few little tweaks, the Mad Scientist once again, easily creates a powerful exercise to shape your butt.
Today, however, we are going to round out the unique muscle-sculpting exercises, this time focusing on the upper arms.
Let’s hear what he has to say….
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Craig Ballantyne: Let’s finish off with arm training, some bicep and tricep stuff that everyone can put to use.
Nick Nilsson: Definitely. One of my favorite bodyweight tricep exercises is a bodyweight tricep extension. You can do this anywhere. You can do it between a few of chairs; you can do it on the edge of a desk, a railing, anything.
Set your feet about three or four feet back, put your hands on the bar about shoulder width position. Now, you keep your elbows in and you lower your head underneath the bar bending just at your elbows. Then you extend back up.
It’s basically turning a regular tricep extension exercise around and doing it as a bodyweight exercise instead. This one hits the tricep extremely well. You can make it easier by moving your feet in closer to the bar, and you can make it harder by moving them further out. As you get really strong you can even raise your feet up so that you’re getting more of a downward angle on them too.
Craig Ballantyne: Very cool. Biceps?
Nick Nilsson: Let me see. Trying to think of one that will really kill people. Actually, one of the best tips I have for biceps is doing an incline dumbbell curls a bit differently than you normally would find people doing them.
Most people when they’re doing the inclined dumbbell curls, and honestly the inclined dumbbell curl is one of the BEST bicep exercises you can do because of how it puts a great stretch at the bottom. What this variation does is actually increases that stretch by changing your body position.
If you think about it, when you’re doing a regular dumbbell curl on the incline bench the amount that your shoulders can stretch back is limited by that bench. So, what I tell people to do is instead of lying with your back on the bench, sit so that you’re about halfway up the bench, your feet are on the seat, and your upper back is over the top of the bench.
Now when you lean back your shoulders can go way back, and it puts a much bigger stretch on your biceps at the bottom. You’ll get a lot more results by doing it that way, and you’ll feel the difference immediately when you do it this way.
Craig Ballantyne: Very interesting. All right is there anything we didn’t cover that you want to mention?
Nick Nilsson: I’m trying to think. I think we covered most of the major muscle groups here and a lot of different stuff.
Craig Ballantyne: What about a shrug exercise? Anything different for the traps?
Nick Nilsson: For traps, actually one of the best things I’ve found to take away the tendency for people to use too much leg is to do these kneeling on the ground.
You set the barbell on the floor in front of you and you grip it as you normally would, but instead of standing you’re kneeling. You just do a shrug from that position. That takes pretty much all the legs out of it, so you’re doing just traps. I’ve found that to be really effective.
Craig Ballantyne: Interesting. All right very good stuff. Thank you, Nick. Again, just mention the website where you can get free workouts, the membership site, and people can definitely check that stuff out and learn a lot about new ways to train.
Nick Nilsson: Absolutely. The site where you can get the program is www.FitStep.com. I’ve got all my books available at www.Fitness-ebooks.com. The site that has all the free samples of the created exercises I’ve come up is at PowerfulTrainingSecrets.com.
Craig Ballantyne: Okay, perfect. Thank you so much, Nick. This is Craig Ballantyne from TurbulenceTraining.com. Hopefully you’ve got some new stuff to put in your workouts. 