Arm Blasters have been around for decades but have never really gained the popularity that many other training tools have for whatever reason – but it should have.

What is it?

It’s essentially a metal plate with a harness that goes over your neck. It’s a training tool specifically designed for training the biceps. You can use it with dumbbells, barbells, and cable machines.

How it works

Your biceps rest against the sides of the plate, and that helps isolate your movements and reduces your ability to cheat your curls.

With that, let’s look at the benefits from training with this simple and straightforward exercise tool.

Perfect form

It’s easy to make mistakes when you’re doing curls. Some people tend to swing a lot and the arm blaster helps correct that. It keeps your elbows in place so all your mechanical tension is where it should be – on your biceps.

Once you’ve locked in a good form, you’ll get used to keeping your elbows close to your sides so you can focus on a full contraction at the top of each rep.

Keep tension on the muscles

Progressive overload is crucial if you want to make gains in strength, endurance, and muscle size. While the biceps is a small muscle group, the same principle holds true.

You want to make each and every session count, and you can do that by making sure you keep tension on the muscles you’re working on even as you’re gradually overloading it by increasing the weight, increasing reps, or by decreasing the rest time between sets.

Not performing the exercise correctly – in this case, the proclivity or tendency to swing unnecessarily – removes the tension from the biceps or from the muscles being targeted. If you’re using momentum to propel the weight, that’s cheating and you’re wasting your time.

But with the arm blaster, you’re locked in. Some people find it uncomfortable to use, but it’s precisely this rigidity in ensuring you’re moving correctly that makes it such a simple and effective tool.

Check your ego at the door

Showing off at the gym is commonplace, and why not, right? When you’re able to hit those numbers, it feels great.

But some people get carried away and lift bigger, heavier weights without watching proper form and that’s a bad idea. You’re not maximizing the benefits of the exercise, and you’re opening yourself up to the risk of injury.

People can get carried away chasing those numbers, it happens to the best of us.

But with the arm blaster, you can’t cheat. You can lift only what you can truly lift with the necessary muscles, no momentum, and no bad form.

Honesty is the best policy

Especially when it comes to fitness, and few tools will show you just what is what than the arm blaster does.

So should it be an essential training tool? You don’t have to take it from us – Arnold Schwarzenegger himself seems to think so (in his book, The Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding).

Try it out, and let us know what you think!