The Motor Unit

The Vanity Muscles. Yup, there is such a thing. Today’s post is going to be all about the most obvious muscles you notice when someone wears a tight t-shirt and shorts. 

It’s the muscles you see a bunch of douchey gym-goers train obsessively for several hours on end in the name of looking good while neglecting every other major muscle group meant for normal functioning. 

I’m talking about the biceps, triceps, the forearms, and the calf muscles. Some would group the chest muscles under this bracket but we’re going to stick to the four mentioned earlier.

So, what is it about the vanity muscles I wanted to talk about? It’s about whether you need to be training them a lot.

The short answer is nope. Well, except for calves maybe because depending on someone’s genes, it might take a hell of a lot to make them grow or not much at all and they’re involved directly in walking, running, and sprinting. 

But the thing about the biceps, the forearms, and the triceps is that, unless your goals are aesthetic, you don’t need to train them through a dedicated arm-day selection of exercises to train them. You involve them automatically when training multi-joint push, pull, and loaded carry exercises. 

Here are a couple of examples to help you understand this point better. Consider the push pattern exercises - when you train the bench press or shoulder press, the triceps are involved to help you extend your elbows and push the weight up. Now consider the pull pattern - when you do pullups, pulldowns, or rows, your biceps are involved in flexing the elbows to pull the weight closer to your body and your forearms are involved in gripping and stabilizing the weight. 

This implies a few things when training weights - 

1. You can see significant developments in the strength and musculature of these muscle groups with just push and pull compound exercises. If you want to bias these muscles a bit more then all you have to do is change the grips (neutral grip vs supinated grip vs pronated grip for pulling exercises and close vs regular grips for pushing exercises.)

2. You don’t have to spend hours at the gym to train your arms separately and save a lot of precious time (unless you’re a physique athlete or your goals are aesthetic in general)

3. Being synergist muscles, you can train them as accessory exercises when you feel like your strength or performance in the main push-pull compound lifts start lagging (if you’re a competitive powerlifter or if you just want to get stronger in general)

Another vanity muscle group is the abs, but I’ve talked about training the abs and the core musculature in length already, which you can read up on here and here.

So, I trust this insight has proven useful to you and I leave you to think about this until next time.