Achieve Slender Arms

With the will to stick with a training regimen and a potential shift to your dietary behavior, you can move towards your goal of getting slender arms. However, keep in mind that you cannot lose weight from one specific part of your body. To become more slender generally, you’ll have to do cardio exercises at least a few times a week. With resistance exercises, you can target your arms specifically, toning the muscles that will show off the evidence of all your hard work.

Steps

Exercising to Get Rid of Unwanted Body Fat

1. Do cardio exercises every other day. The most important factor in slenderizing your arms is cutting down on body fat. Cutting your calories with a diet is the best way to Reduce-Your-Overall-Body-Fat, but adding cardio exercises can also help you to burn more calories. Spend 20 to 30 minutes on alternating days doing something that keeps your heart rate up throughout the exercise. Some of the best forms of cardio exercise include jogging, swimming, and biking. If you prefer to work out at a gym, rowing and spinning can also get your heart rate up and keep it going.
   • Team sports like basketball may be more fun, and can also offer a decent cardio workout. If you’re playing a sport that allows a lot of stop-and-go action, supplement the workout with a ten minute jog after the game.
   • While cardio workouts can initially be challenging if you have a significant amount of body fat to lose, know this: the more you have to lose, the quicker you’ll see results.
2. Monitor your heart rate. If possible, monitor your heart rate while exercising, as this can help you determine whether you’re working hard enough. Your mid-workout heart rate should decrease after a few weeks of doing the same exercise at the same level of intensity. If it does not drop noticeably as you improve your cardio fitness, this means you haven’t been doing an aggressive enough workout. Pick up the pace or exercise for a little while longer!
   • Expect to see your body – including your arms – start to lose body fat within four weeks. While initial achievements are only the beginning, record them and congratulate yourself to fuel your motivation to stick with your workout routine.
3. Assess whether you should focus on cardio for a while. Arms are especially hard to keep slender, and will wiggle a bit, no matter how fit you are. It can be helpful to make non-judgmental self-assessments of your level of fitness and proceed accordingly. For instance, if you are unable to do a push-up, you should start a fitness regimen based on cardio, and proceed to resistance exercises after you’ve gotten rid of some body fat.
   • For a more specific assessment of your body fat, get in a push-up position, with your body held horizontal by outstretched arms, about shoulder-width apart. Reach up and across your body with one hand to the midpoint of the back of your other arm and pinch the flesh. If you can loosely gather an inch or more between your fingertips, you should focus on cardio exercises initially.
4. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Know that you may be perfectly healthy – and look great – even if your arms aren’t as taut as the people in this seasons’ swimsuit magazines. Women, especially, tend to accumulate body fat in particular areas of their body. This includes the upper arms. Women are also less likely to include upper arm workouts in daily exercise regimens without making the conscious decision to target the arms specifically.
   • There’s good news: the areas of your body that accumulate fat deposits are also those that will give up fat the quickest as you begin to maintain a cardio regimen.

Toning Your Arm Muscles

1. Target the muscles in your arms. Your biceps, triceps, and forearms can all be targeted by specific exercises. Each of these areas, as well as your shoulders, need to be repetitively trained with increasingly challenging resistance exercises in order to have more visual definition. In sum, resistance exercises will also help you reduce your body fat generally, but will also contribute to the growth of lean, well-defined arm muscles.
   • Don’t be concerned that you’ll develop large, muscular arms. You can do specific exercises that will lead to lean, toned muscle that will actually facilitate a decrease in the circumference of your arm despite an increase in strength and definition.
2. Default to exercises that incorporate dumbbells. While barbell exercises are better for building strength, dumbbells will better help you tone the specific muscles you’re working. Dumbbells also allow for some creative, dynamic exercises that can work your biceps, triceps, and shoulders in one routine.
   • For each exercise, use the heaviest weight with which you can safely complete that specific exercise. Increase both the weight and the number of reps for each exercise whenever you are able to do so.
3. Work your arms and shoulders in one routine. Stand with feet shoulder-width apart and a dumbbell in each hand and your arms extended straight out to the sides of your body. Keep your upper arms parallel to the floor and bend your arms at the elbow with your palms facing towards you. Extend your arms straight upwards from your shoulders, keeping the palms face towards one another. Finally, bend your elbows again, this time lowering the weights slowly behind your head as far as you can comfortably reach. Do the reverse to return to starting position and do 15 to 25 reps.
4. Target your triceps with push-ups and dips. Since fat tends to deposit on the back of your upper arm, your triceps is the most important part of your arm to focus on. Further, any triceps exercises also work other parts of the arms and shoulders, leading to a more slender upper body in general.
   • Diamond push-ups are the crème-de-la-crème for working the triceps. Hold your body horizontal on your toes and hands. Position your hands as close together while still being able to complete five push-ups. Try to get the point where your pointer fingers and thumbs can touch each other, forming a diamond!
   • Dips are another incredibly effective exercise to target and tone your triceps. Sit on the ground just in front of the bottom step of a stairway, with your legs outstretched in front of you and the back of your heels pushing downward. Reach back with your palms on either side, and lift your weight off the ground. Work your way up to doing this, but from the height of a chair – this will isolate your triceps even better.
5. Include several bicep-specific exercises in your regimen. Toning your biceps is tricky, in part because you’ve got to work three different muscle groups to sculpt the front of your upper arm—the biceps, triceps, and forearm muscles. Most bicep exercises involve bending the elbow. The classic biceps workout is the chin-up, which involves pulling yourself up to a bar with your palms facing towards you. While your back and shoulders are engaged, your biceps also get the most strenuous workout.
6. Use dumbbells to target the biceps. Perhaps the best example of a biceps exercise with dumbbells is the dumbbell curl. To perform this exercise, stand with knees slightly bent and feet shoulder width apart. Hold a dumbbell in each hand, with arms hanging at your sides and your palms facing forward. Bend one arm at the elbow and curl the dumbbell almost to your shoulder. After lowering the dumbbell, repeat the move with your other arm.
   • Keep your elbows near your sides while lifting and lowering the dumbbell.
   • Perform this exercise on an incline bench to increase the focus of the movement on your biceps.
7. Incorporate the hammer curl with a twist. Simply add a twist of your wrist into the upward pull of a standard dumbbell curl so that the weight is positioned as though it is the head of hammer when it reaches your shoulder. This addition will include your forearms in the workout, and toning multiple parts of your arm in one workout.
   • It’s easier to lose track of your posture with more dynamic movements. Remember to keep your head back and your spine straight. Squeeze your shoulder blades together to help stabilize your arms, and remember to keep your elbows against your sides.
8. Focus on the forearms with specific routines as well. You need to add strength to your forearms, if only in order to keep up with the increasing weight and reps you’ll be able to do. Even simply walking around with weights in your hands and your arms hanging at your sides will give your forearms a decent workout as they have to maintain the grip.
   • Step-up your forearm workout, and prepare yourself to be able to do more pull-ups, by performing a bar hang. Pull yourself half way up, so that your elbows are at 90 degrees, and hold the position as long as you can. You can even simply hang with your arms straight to develop initial forearm strength.
9. Change your arm workouts frequently. There are countless different exercises that focus on your arms – learn a new one whenever one that you’ve been doing for a while becomes particularly easy to perform. This prevents your body from adapting to the workout, which can decrease the benefits from the exercise. Most importantly, you’ve got to work arm muscles frequently and consistently to see a significant change in their actual shape.
   • Make sure to incorporate workouts with different grips to ensure you’re working all the specific muscles in the group that different exercises target.

Eating Healthy, Slenderizing Food

1. Eat unsaturated fats! While it may seem surprising to read about the necessity of consuming fats, the important distinction when looking to slim down is ensuring that you’re only eating the right types of fats. In fact, there are many types of food that include a high amount of unsaturated fats that will likely help you lose weight! A few initial dietary changes may include:
   • Switching to cold-pressed olive oil for use as an ingredient – especially in salad dressings – and for stovetop cooking.
   • Eat olives on their own too! Olives offer an especially interesting combination of nutritional attributes: they are high in healthy fats, but low in calories. Accordingly, olives are an ideal snack to make you feel full without undermining your effort to cut down overall calories. However, keep in mind that olives are also high in salt, so limit how many you eat.
   • Snack on avocados and nuts in moderation. Avocados and various types of nuts are not only healthy, they are flavorful and satisfying. Try swapping these for other snacks, such as wings and chips. The more you eat snacks like these, the more you’ll crave them.
2. Stop eating trans fat and limit saturated fat consumption. As you increase your physical activity and take other immediate steps to reduce body fat and tone your arms, you should make changes to your diet that will have an even longer-term impact on your mission to slenderize your arms. In particular, you need to become more aware of the amounts and types of fat that you’re consuming, as the wrong sort of diet will prevent your arms – not to mention the rest of your body – from becoming slender.
   • Avoid eating processed meats and anything from a fast food restaurant, which contain immense amounts of unhealthy fats.
   • Vary your meat consumption generally by prominently including low fat meats like poultry in your meals. When you do eat red meat, opt for organic, grass-fed options. When consuming fattier cuts like pork chops or steak, trim off the fat and don't eat it!
   • The source of any saturated fat you do eat is important. For instance, a glass of whole milk, or a bit of butter with a serving of vegetables may lead to more filling and satisfying meals that may even lead to eating less overall.
3. Fill up on fruits and veggies. You don’t have to all of the sudden eat less food to start losing weight. You can eat plenty of fruits, vegetables, and foods that are high in fiber. These are the foods most likely to give you the nutrition you need, satiate a craving, and even keep you feeling full for longer. You can even add to your meals by building up sandwiches or entrees with lettuce, tomato, greens, and avocado. In fact, add a whole course to dinner: eat a salad to help you fill up before getting to the heavier portions of the meal.
   • If you’re insistent on embellishing your veggies with a bit of kitchen flair, steam them with herbs, spices, and olive oil, or a bit of butter.
   • Eat plenty of beans – garbanzo, lentil, black, etc. – as these have plenty of fiber too. Add them to salads or entrees to increase portion size while keeping nutritional quality high.
   • If you still need a midday snack between meals, eat carrots or another veggie with hummus. Soon, you’ll prefer healthy snacks to the chips and other tempting options that will keep you from losing weight.
4. Reduce your sugar consumption immediately. One of the most prevalent culprits of unnecessary calorie consumption is food that is high in sugar. Further, sugar actually makes burning fat harder, as eating lots of sugar reduces the efficiency of the enzymes that are capable of burning fat. If you’re serious about achieving a more slender body composition, you’ve got to eliminate the soda and sweets habit starting today.
   • If you’re having sugar cravings, opt for a sweet fruit such as a mango. Before you know it, you’ll start craving fruit instead of candy bars.
   • High-fiber cereals, oatmeal, and multigrain breads make for a great breakfast. Add fruit to the meal if you favor sweetness, and keep yourself from eating sugary cereals or pastries. Just make sure that you check the label for added sugar.
   • For more specific advice about nutrition, see the wikiHow article on eating a healthy, balanced diet.

Warnings

• Do not waste your money or time on "spot reduction" gimmicks such a creams, oils, or bands.
• Many of these exercises can place stress on your wrists. If your wrists begin to feel pain during resistance workouts, change your hand positions.

Related Articles

• Get Toned Arms
• Create a Bicep Workout

Sources and Citations

See also

• Improve Your Fitness With Proper Sports Nutrition
• Do Water Aerobics
• Cross Train
• Choose a Personal Trainer
• Get Bigger Chest Muscles (Pecs)
• Get Exercise Outdoors
• Do Core Exercises
• Floor Press
• Tighten Stomach Skin
• Measure Your Thighs

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