It has long been trendy among certain online weightlifting circles to brag about not training arms.
A line of thinking roughly as asinine as bragging about not changing your car tyres until the tread is right on (and probably a bit past) the legal minimum, given how their role in keeping you glued to the road mirrors that played by the arms in holding or otherwise supporting weights to facilitate efficient, effective, safe lifting.
Yet brag they do in comments sections and forum threads, with some going further and labelling all forms of arm training ghey.
Why do they do this?
Insecurity, mainly.
In my experience, the ones vomiting this garbage are without exception fat or weedy blokes whose entire identity is built around a fiercely reductive idea of strength training that involves training the basic compound movements (barbell back squats, bench presses, deadlifts, rows and, maybe, overhead presses) and nothing else.
It’s almost like training in that manner creates a fat or weedy form depending on how much a person eats.
Almost.
Anyway.
You would do well to pay these sorts no heed because their “philosophy” will do nothing but hamstring your training in the long term.
Yes, you will probably see some modest gains in strength and muscle if you do nothing but compound lift the snot out of yourself for a few months.
But beyond that?
You will stall, hard.
Worse, your only option to get yourself out of that stall is to eat lots of food and cut back on whatever cardio you are doing (if you are doing any at all).
A recipe for becoming a walking heart attack if ever there was.
But hey, people on the internet will think you’re hardcore because you can squat 200kg at a bodyweight of 140kg, so at least there’s that.
All right, enough of this.
If you want to learn a way of writing balanced programmes (that always include some curlz for the girlz) so you can make slow yet roughly incremental progress for many years to come, my blatantly biased recommendation is that you enroll on my three month programme called:
“Silver Era Secrets”
The methods are drawn from the pre-steroid era of bodybuilding (based on those used by the likes of Steeve Reeves, Reg Park, Eric Pederson, and others) – teachings that are all but lost to the mists of time if my occasional foray onto fitness social media is anything to go by.
The details are on the below page.
Please read the whole thing very carefully before committing, to make sure your choice to work with me is a fully informed one:
https://philtyreman.co.uk/programme/
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman