Guns Blazing: Arm Specialization Program

The most fun I’ve ever had in the gym was when I was doing one of our old workout programs, Right to Bear Arms.

It had 2–3 sets of squats, presses, pulls, and deadlifts per week—just barely enough to maintain our size and strength. The lion's share of our effort went to training biceps, triceps, shoulders, and forearms.

The workouts were faster and easier than I was used to, giving us a respite from balanced training. Just a brief respite. The program was only 4 weeks long.

Take what I’m about to tell you with a pinch of salt. I feel like I must have made some sort of measurement error. But my lanky arms grew an inch during those four weeks, even though I only gained 3–4 pounds of body weight.

I knew some of that was from short-term adaptations like cellular swelling, muscle edema, and extra glycogen storage. I figured when I went back to my regular routine, my arms would deflate. But they didn’t. I kept the inch. Quite a few clients got similar results.

A couple of years later, we created a second arm program: Call to Arms. Muscle growth takes time, especially as you get more advanced. We wanted to give people more time to focus on their arms, so we made the program 4 months long. That meant it had to be more balanced overall. It’s one of our most highly-rated programs of all time.

I announced that I was going to polish it up, updating all the research, redoing the illustrations, and adding some extra functionality to the workout sheets. But people didn't want that. They'd already done that program. They wanted something new. That's fair.

So, we started from scratch, building a brand new arm program based on what we've learned from over a decade of running people through arm specialization routines.

Right to Bear Arms was short, urgent, and savage. Call to Arms was better, but it was too reasonable, too balanced, too patient. Some of the best techniques only came into full swing in Phase Three, nearly three months into the program.

We wanted this new program to be long enough to build noticeably bigger arms, but we also wanted to go in "guns blazing" right from week one.

Guns Blazing is 8 weeks long. 16 if you start with Normal Mode and then do Hard Mode.

There are 3 workouts per week. 2 of them are savage arm days. The third workout is a full-body workout. It gives you just enough to maintain your overall size and strength (and includes some extra arm training).

• Monday: Arm Day
• Tuesday: Rest or cardio
• Wednesday: Full-Body (Including Arms)
• Thursday: Rest or cardio
• Friday: Arm Day
• Saturday: Rest or cardio
• Sunday: Rest

Most research shows that 10–20 sets per muscle per week are enough to maximize your rate of muscle growth when following a balanced program (Baz-Valle).

But there's also research showing that if we train some muscles less, we can benefit from training other muscles more—sometimes much more. The catch is that you need to work up to it gradually, adding volume as your muscles grow tougher (Enes):

1. Normal Mode starts at 10 sets per week and climbs up to over 30 sets per week for each major arm muscle (e.g. 14 => 32 sets for your biceps).
2. Hard Mode starts at 20 sets per week and climbs to nearly 40 sets per week for each major arm muscle (e.g. 20 => 39 sets for your biceps).

Most of that volume comes from a variety of arm isolation exercises. For example, we'll show you several different ways to do biceps curls, even if all you have are dumbbells. Some of those exercises will hit your biceps especially hard at longer muscle lengths. Others will stimulate muscle growth through lesser-known pathways.

None of this is controversial. Bodybuilders and athletes have been using specialization routines for decades. There's a long tradition, strong expert consensus, and good research proving that specialization routines can work incredibly well.

We built the arm program we wanted to do. Testing it has been the most fun I've had in years. I think you're going to love it.