Biceps&Triceps Day

Triceps training

Biceps training

Now go to work!

Find your MOTIVATION!

Photo: Pond5

Are you looking to make your occasional strength class or Sunday spin session a regular ritual? Many casual exercisers want to sweat more often, but they struggle with finding the workout motivation to make fitness a part of their daily routine.

Conventional wisdom hasn’t been particularly helpful in figuring out how to get in the groove and become that person who says, “I’ll meet you for brunch later. Gotta fit in my run first.” You’re told you have to “want it” enough. Or that you have to do something 21 days in a row before it becomes second nature. But what do you do on the 29th day when it’s cold outside and you’re dying to skip your run and sleep for another hour instead?

RELATED: Detoxing for Beach Season? Here’s Your 5-Day Plan

Fitness Motivation Made Easy

Fortunately, economists and psychologists have been studying how to crack the code of what compels us to repeatedly do something we don’t always want to do. Here are some of their best strategies.

1. Give Yourself a Real Reward  

Sure, some people might be motivated by vague goals such as “better health” or “weight control.” But if that’s not doing it for you, journalist Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business advises making the benefits of working out more tangible, such as by treating yourself to a smoothie or an episode of The Leftovers afterwards.

“An extrinsic reward is so powerful because your brain can latch on to it and make the link that the behavior is worthwhile.”

He describes creating a neurological “habit loop,” which involves a cue to trigger the behavior (setting out your spinning shoes next to your bag), the routine (making it through spinning class) and then the reward. “An extrinsic reward is so powerful because your brain can latch on to it and make the link that the behavior is worthwhile,” he explains. “It increases the odds the routine becomes a habit.”

RELATED: Ab Challenge: 5 Planks to Sculpt Your Core for Summer

Over time, the motivation becomes intrinsic, as the brain begins to associate sweat and pain with the surge of endorphins — those feel-good chemicals released in the brain that are responsible for that “I-feel-freaking-amazing” rush you get after a great gym session. Once you’ve trained your brain to recognize that the workout itself is the reward, you won’t even want the treat.

2. Sign a Commitment Contract

We can make promises to ourselves all day long, but research shows we’re more likely to follow through with pledges when we make them in front of friends.

You can up the ante even more by signing a contract agreeing to pay a pal $20 every time you skip Pilates. “It’s a simple notion of changing the cost,” explains Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University who studies health decision science. “I say I’m going to make a commitment to do something for a certain amount of time, such as exercising 30 minutes three times a week for 12 weeks. If I don’t do that, I’m going to pay some kind of penalty, whether it’s monetary or the embarrassment of having friends know I didn’t live up to my word.”

RELATED: 5 Ways to Stop Stress Eating from Taking Over Your Brain

In studies of people who created online contracts via the site www.stickk.com, Goldhaber-Fiebert and his colleagues found that those who signed longer contracts ended up exercising more than those who agreed to shorter durations. “We have to get past the initial experience of displeasure in order to recognize the longer-term benefits,” he says. “The challenge is designing tools to help make that happen.”

3. Rethink Positive Thinking

Devotees of positive thinking have long promoted visualizing the benefits of a behavior as a motivational strategy. For example, when I’m deciding whether to get out of bed to go running in the morning, it helps to imagine how the sun will feel on my face as I run around the reservoir. Or how delighted I’ll be when I see my new muscles developing.

“After you imagine the obstacle, you can figure out what you can do to overcome it and make a plan.”

But such feel-good fantasies are only effective when accompanied by more realistic problem-solving methods, according to Gabriele Oettingen, PhD, psychologist at New York University and author of Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation (due out in October).

RELATED: How to Get Good at Stress (And Make It Work in Your Favor)

Here’s the rest of the formula: After identifying your wish and visualizing the outcome, you have to identify what’s holding you back — a technique she calls “mental contrasting.” In one study of 51 female students who claimed they wanted to eat fewer junk food snacks, researchers asked each woman to imagine the benefits of nibbling on better foods. Those who identified the trigger that made healthful snacking difficult for them — and came up with a plan to reach for fruit when cravings hit — were most successful at sticking to their goal.

Feel too tired to go to the gym after work? “After you imagine the obstacle, you can figure out what you can do to overcome it and make a plan,” explains Oettingen. For example, you can switch to morning or lunchtime workouts or go straight to the gym instead of stopping at home first.

4. Get Paid

Still struggling? It may be time to turn to cold, hard cash. (Because, hey, money talks.) Research looking at monetary incentives and exercise found that people who were paid $100 to go to the gym doubled their attendance rate. “You just need to get people to keep doing an activity, and paying them money was effective,” explains study author Gary Charness, PhD, behavioral economist at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

RELATED: Why Regaining Weight Is So Common and How to Deal

Don’t have a generous benefactor? Check out the app Pact, in which a community of fellow users will literally pay you to stick to your schedule. If you miss your session, you authorize the app to charge your credit card or PayPal account. When you reach your goal, you get paid out of a common pool funded by yourself and other pact-breakers.

No matter how you get there, you know you’ve succeeded once the day arrives when you can’t imagine skipping your workout. You can call it an addiction, a pleasure or an escape. But the important thing is that you’re doing it on a regular basis, and that you’re doing it for you.

Pump your arms now!

Have you been doing curls for months with nothing to show? You may have arm training all wrong. Check out Lee Boyce's top 3 exercises for arm development!

Training the arms with the proper intensity and intention is heavily abused.
The ringleaders being your classic squat rack curlers who use more swing than the Golden State Warriors offense.
It’s no surprise that the pipes they aspire for are usually nothing more than a faint glimmer of hope over the real life pipe-cleaners they possess.
Aside from the universal no-no that is curling in the squat rack, people like this are actually making a list of mistakes when it comes to attacking the arms for strength and size.
The top 3 exercises in my books to make arms grow may seem unconventional for the split, but the benefits will speak for themselves.
Related: 5 Killer Arm Workouts for Tank Top Season

EXERCISE 1: CHIN UPS

If you really want to see your guns grow, it’s time to get overhead and focus on some chins. If you question the efficacy of chin ups for biceps development, let’s look at things from the most practical method we can.
Here’s a little homework: Find any high level gymnast that doesn’t have impressive biceps development for his overall size and frame. It’ll prove to be a more difficult task than you think. The reason is simple, the cumulative volume of overhead pulling most gymnasts go through as part of their sport makes the biceps respond using the SAID Principle (specific adaptation to imposed demands).

In layman's terms, the amount of overhead pulling causes the biceps to simply get bigger and stronger to adapt.
It doesn’t stop there. Pulling from overhead also optimizes the involvement of the brachialis muscle, an upper arm muscle that runs deep to the biceps. When it’s developed, it creates thickness from inside and also increases the prominence of the coveted “peak” lifters are usually after. It’s something standard curls don’t hit quite as effectively.
As a directive, it’s important to remember your emphasis when using the chin up for arm development – and this is the only place you’ll see me recommend anything less than great form for a chin up. Proper chin ups ask for a set shoulder and a pull through the elbows to hit the lats and upper back muscles that are primarily responsible for the lift.
Since we’re targeting the biceps, it’s a good idea to at least partially abandon that emphasis and pull using the hands and arms instead. Let your arms bear most of the load that you’re pulling instead of your back. It makes the lift harder, but your arms will be the recipient of endless gains.

EXERCISE 2: FRENCH PRESS

On a similar wavelength, overhead triceps work will target the long head of the triceps, which is a neglected muscle skipped in favor of press downs, close grip bench press, and other lateral head-dominant movements.
The French press may be a humbling exercise at first as far as weight lifted goes; it’s not a heavy hitter meathead movement that you can load up like you can a close grip bench. But when they’re done correctly, they can leave the triceps on fire and possibly even create a bit more mobility at the shoulder joint.
One common mistake when training this movement is to let the elbows flare outwards a lot. Some outward rotation is acceptable –especially if you’re a bigger guy – but in general, the goal should be to keep the elbows turned in. Using an EZ Curl bar to adjust your wrist position can help this cause.

If you have a history of shoulder issues, or you can’t quite create the range of motion at the shoulder joint to facilitate this movement with good form, a suitable alternative could be the skull crusher plus.
Traditional skull crushers also hit the lateral head of the triceps and can cause varying levels of elbow stress in the process. Adding an overhead component to the skull crusher can alleviate elbow stress and tap into the long head as well as the lateral head.

EXERCISE 3: DIPS

This exercise is difficult for a reason. Bodyweight and weighted dipsare supreme mass builders for the triceps, front deltoids, and chest.  Many lifters gravitate to bench dips with the feet elevated, but I’d actually recommend against that for most populations.
The setup for bench dips places the upper arm in a very internally rotated position, which isn’t the safest environment for the shoulder capsule to bear load. To make matters worse, there’s no correction for this positioning.
Instead, use parallel bars, and get deep. Many lifters complain about similar shoulder stress when doing this variation. In truth, there will be certain exercises that don’t agree with the skeletal frame of a lifter. The parallel bar dip was always one of those for me personally.
Related: 18 Week Chin Up & Dip Program For An Impressive Upper Body
Over time, however, I’ve found a couple of hacks that can make the exercise feel much better and more effective in hitting the muscles without hitting the joints.

USE FAT GRIPS

I’ve found that during pressing movements, performing the lift using thick grips helps distribute the load over a greater surface area in the palm of the hand. This directly affects joint stress as relates to the elbow and shoulder. All things equal, you’ll find immediate relief, at least on a marginal scale if you typically experience discomfort.

EXAMINE YOUR WIDTH

As a bigger guy myself, I’ve found that many pull up/dip complex stations have a very narrow setup that can’t be adjusted at all. It can be a bit constricting to squeeze into this uncomfortable position and attempt to crack out dips in the process, and that chaos usually lends to joint discomfort.
A better alternative would be to make a makeshift dips station in a squat cage, given it’s available for use (you might not want to be “that guy” in a crowded gym).
To do them, set up a pair of bars across the pins just above waist level, and customize the width between them and wrist angle. Set the bars on thin yoga mats if you’re worried about them sliding.  Next, step inside and go to town!

SUMMARY

As a final note, it’s important to remember the ratio of triceps to biceps: The triceps have 60% of your upper arm muscle. That means it’s probably a good idea to train them with a bit more emphasis. Curls for the girls are fine every once in a while, but for true upper arm mass, it’s important to remember your triceps.

Applying these directives to your arm days will probably leave you too gassed out to even bother with curls anyways, and your arms will be torched until it’s…. time to do more chin ups on back day!