Thin, toned arms can be the stuff of dreams. Ever looked in the mirror and thought, how are my arms so flabby? Are there arm toning workouts? Arm fat exercises? For goodness sake, what are good arm workouts? Because you don’t like that arm fat.
Instead of telling you what you already know, here are some don’ts. Do not do these things if you want smaller arms. Suggestions are given to avoid blundering into the don’t zone for smaller arms.
It doesn’t work. Fat targeting is not a thing. You can huff and puff through 100 curls a day, but you just won’t get the arms you want. And if you do, it will take so much longer.
You are basically spending time building muscle but doing little to burn actual fat. Rather taking time to learn full-body exercises along with arm exercises ought to make the difference.
What to do instead?
Multi-joint exercises. Push up, pull up, push back, pull forward. Better yet, have a proper workout routine that includes your shoulders and back. add your belly in for some variation. Hell, may as well do the whole thing. Beach bod + skinny arms, here we come!
She has a couple of 1kg weights in her house that she leaves on the corner where it is prominently visible. Every morning she uses them to do her isolation movements, feverishly working towards slim upper arms. When her friends come over, she explains that she is afraid of getting too “bulky.”
No, she is not going to lose weight. Firstly, because she is in the wrong century. Present 21st century knows that ‘bulking up’ is a lot harder than women have wanted to believe in the past.
Secondly, to actually see muscle definition and smaller arms, training with small weights is redundant. Instead, use heavier weights that challenge your muscles into action.
To know how heavy is enough, do 5 sets of 8-12 reps. If you can easily do it, your weights are too small. If it’s hard but you push through and maintain the correct form, then that’s the weight for you.
Cardio for arm slimming sounds contradictory but it’s not. In fact, it is far more effective than the 1 kg curls “she” does every morning and evening. Cardio also helps your body with recovery from more intense training.
Lucky for you, cardio doesn’t just mean running on a treadmill staring at a screen. It could be running outside (all that nature can be distracting enough if you take a minute to look,) kickboxing, swimming, or pretty much any movement that raises your heart rate (for an extended time period), use large muscles and has you sweating like a hooker in church.
Need a cardio goal? 150- 250 minutes a week should do it according to Livestrong. That is 2.5 hours – 4.167 hours an entirely achievable goal.
Motivation has kicked in, it’s the last time you are going to deal with flabby arms that won’t fit into that incredible top you just bought. You are getting in shape, and let everybody watch.
So you hit the gym, and you are out there sweating every morning/evening. You’ve done your research and you are ready to go in for that lower body barbell complex.
Wait, what? No, you are not. You can’t do a barbell dead-lift and you still don’t know what a Romanian dead-lift is, how are you claiming a complex bodybuilding exercise routine?
If you are working out, heavy breathing, sweats and all, but you haven’t figured out the correct posture and range of motion for each exercise, injury and burn-out are in your future.
What to do instead?
Take it slow. Start with learning the movement, do sets of 10, and then increase the difficulty. If you have never done a push up before, start with the girl version with knees instead of toes, or start with the wall then move to the ground. This allows your body to transition well.
Not a thing? Probably is though. Problem is eating whatever you want all the time won’t get you those skinny arms you want. Maybe it’s God’s way of keeping our greed dialed in; eat shit, feel like shit, look like shit. I’m not saying that being overweight and/or having big arms means you look like shit, but if you are looking for a solution, you probably think it looks like shit.
If you have been destroying those push-ups, morning and evening, and you know you are doing it right, but still seeing no results, there’s a reason for it. Your constant trips to the fridge, your unconscious reach for the phone to dial; fatty, unhealthy food delivered to your doorstep, your balling and restaurant spending, your cookies in your office drawer, just waiting for someone to annoy you or for a slight hunger pang, offering immediate comfort and all your other ingrained, unsavory food habits are probably the culprit.
Remember, killing those workouts will make you stronger, but it won’t make your arms smaller if you don’t eat better.
If you have tried to eat better and struggle, take comfort in this scientific reasoning:
The brain responds to weight loss by defending the stores of fat in your body. It does this for the simple reason that our bodies are incredibly averse to starvation, and it’s the brain’s job to keep it from happening.
“When you lose weight, your energy stores, or fat deposits, decrease. This causes hormones in your body — including one called leptin, which is made by fat cells themselves and normally stops you from feeling hungry — to signal to your brain that your fat stores have fallen below a critical level, according to a 2010 review paper.” Live Science
One of the ways it does this is by encouraging muscle tissue to burn fewer calories. The aim is to increase efficiency, which means that fewer calories are necessary to go through your day. Michele Olson, Ph.D., a professor of exercise science at Auburn University says, “Our bodies were designed to store energy efficiently.”
The brain also makes it so that it changes the reward centers, increasing appetite and overeating as a result. The part of the brain that signals the rewarding feeling after eating is made less active, and vice versa, the areas responsible for restraining food consumption become less active.
Meaning you want to eat more, and you have less restraint. A lose-lose situation
How to win? Set up camp and battle your brain and body. Fight the excessive eating pangs, and keep an eye on what you eat. Healthy fats, vegetables, and plenty of protein for muscle building should do the trick. Avoid sugar and processed foods, they really do take you miles back on your journey to a better, healthier, thin arm life.
Best part? It pays off in the long run. Eventually, your brain adapts to your persistence and discovers a new healthy “normal,” and you can officially pose sideways in pictures and raise your arms like you don’t care because you don’t, you have fantastic arms.
