Arm day: a biceps and triceps session, and where it fits your week

In your first months, rows, pulldowns and presses do much of what your arms need. In a 2013 study by Gentil and colleagues, 29 untrained young men did the lat pulldown and bench press for 10 weeks, one of two groups also adding curls and triceps extensions; elbow-flexor thickness rose 6.5% without the arm work and 7.04% with it, with no difference between groups. Head to head, though, a curl does more for the biceps than a row: in a 2021 study by Mannarino and colleagues, 10 untrained men trained one arm with dumbbell rows and the other with curls for 8 weeks, and elbow-flexor thickness grew 11.06% in the curling arm against 5.16% in the rowing arm. Both studies were small and short.

So a beginner on a full-body plan can skip a separate arm day: a curl and a pushdown after the upper-body lifts cover it. A day of its own makes sense later:

• On a chest and back rotation, where the arms have no other home, as the chest and back workout lays out.
• On a five-day body-part split: chest, back, legs, shoulders and arms.
• For intermediate lifters whose arms have fallen behind after a year or so of steady training.

If you already train back and biceps and chest and triceps twice a week each, the short version is plenty. If your elbows ache from your current training, see a doctor or physiotherapist before adding arm work.

Every row and pulldown bends the elbow under load, so the biceps work on every rep; every press straightens it, so the triceps do. A common rule of thumb counts a hard set of rows or presses as about half a set for the arms, and a curl or extension as a whole one; the hypertrophy volume calculator does the sum.

Leave at least a day between the arm day and a chest or back session, and avoid heavy pressing or pulling the day after it. Tired triceps weaken the bench press and tired biceps and grip cut rows short, which is also why the chest and triceps workout saves its arm work for after the presses. Legs or rest are the easiest neighbours.

A five-day body-part split that follows those rules runs chest, back, legs, arms, rest, shoulders, rest. The 5-day gym workout plan compares other five-day layouts, and every session and plan is in the workout plans library.

Pairing biceps with triceps is common practice: they work opposite sides of the elbow, so one rests while the other works. The close-grip press stays outside the pairs and comes first, in line with the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) position stand's advice to put multiple-joint exercises before single-joint ones. Short of time? Run each pair back to back and rest about 90 seconds after the second exercise.

Keep one triceps exercise with the arm overhead. In a 2023 study by Maeo and colleagues, 21 adults trained cable elbow extensions twice a week for 12 weeks, one arm overhead and the other at the side, as in a pushdown; whole-triceps volume grew 19.9% in the overhead arm against 13.9%, even though it lifted lighter loads. For the biceps, the session mixes a palms-up curl, a braced curl and a neutral-grip hammer curl, and hammer curl vs bicep curl explains what the grip changes.

These sets and reps are estimates from common practice, not prescriptions. In a meta-analysis by Schoenfeld and colleagues, more weekly sets per muscle tended to bring more growth, so take eight sets per muscle as a starting point and add a set only while you recover and keep progressing.

Fixed EZ bars and dumbbells go up in big steps for a small muscle, so add reps first until every set reaches the top of its range, then take the next weight. The cable stacks move in smaller steps, which makes the pushdown and rope work the easiest places to add load. Write each set down, or the arm day becomes the same session every week.

With the swap named in the first table, all three versions run on kit that RPM's floor photos show: a dumbbell rack, a rack of fixed barbells that includes EZ bars, flat benches, squat racks with barbells and the multi-station cable towers. A preacher bench, a dip station and an adjustable bench do not appear in those photos, so ask on a free guided tour what is on the floor and which stations the women-only Ladies section currently holds. A coach in a personal training session can check your curls and extensions.