In a hurry and want something easy to follow? Our top Ultimate Arm Routine is here.

When someone asks you to 'show your muscles' the first thing you would do is tense up you biceps, correct?

While the arms are some of the smaller muscles they are an important set of muscles.

While you should definitely exercise all body parts you should also take the effort to workout your arms too.

What Are The Main Arm Exercises?

There are two main muscles on the arms - biceps (curling/contraction exercises) and triceps (extension exercises). It is important to work both. The arms get worked out during a lot of compound exercises (things such as military presses, pushups, bench press etc all work out the arms too). But it is also a good idea to do some muscle specific exercises to really hit all parts of your arms.

You can also never go wrong with some pull ups/chin ups, that will work your arms and back. But try some of the following exercises to really blast your arms...

Exercises for Biceps

There are a few standard exercises such as bicep curls (and their rarer brother reverse bicep curls), close grip pull ups, preacher curls (EZ Bar Preacher Curls).

An important one to do in the gym is the bicep concentration curl

Read more: 34 Bicep Exercises + Bicep Workouts and Challenges

Exercises for Triceps

The triceps are actually the bigger of the two arm muscles (the triceps actually contains 3 muscles... but it is treated as one muscle for simplicity) and a large range of extension type exercises will hit these muscles. Single arm or double arm tricep extensions (which can be standing up or lying down) hit the muscles hard, as well as things like tricep kickbacks.

Be sure to also do close grip bench press and dips to work your triceps.

If you have access to them in the gym, be sure to do overhead cable extensions and tricep pushdown.