It’s very easy to incorporate other muscles to help you move your body when exercising the arms.
Your shoulders can help take strain and arching your back can help with momentum.
However, this is NOT what we want and will only diminish your potential returns.
Try and focus on stabilising your entire body and using only your bicep or tricep muscle contraction to move your body through the required range of motion.
Keep your focus on stability and squeezing the muscle to be worked.
A good focus tip is to squeeze the intended muscle first then initiate the movement keeping the muscle contracted (squeezed) through the entire ROM.
Technique tips when exercising with a TRX for biceps
They are a two-headed muscle, hence bi, comprised of the long head and the short head.
They work to flex the elbow from a straight to a bent position and supinate the wrist (twist the pinky upwards).
The long head lies on the outside of your arm and the short head on the inside.
The brachialis muscle, which runs underneath the biceps is also a strong elbow flexor.
Biceps Tip 1 – wrist
To aid with bicep contraction during specific exercises, keep your wrist slightly bent back to stop your forearm muscles from engaging too much and taking effort away from your biceps.
Biceps Tip 2 – your pinky
Supinate the wrist at the top of curl exercises. This means twisting your wrist so your pinky finger is higher.
Biceps Tip 3 – squeezing
After each set get into the habit of flexing / squeezing your biceps / triceps for 5 seconds as hard as you can to promote blood flow, recruit additional motor units for muscle activation and mind-muscle connection
Biceps Tip 4 – go reverse grip
The TRX reverse grip curls target your brachialis muscle, which pushes the tricep and bicep muscle away from each other as it increases in size giving you arm a lot more lean shape.
Technique tips when exercising with a TRX for triceps
The triceps lie on the back of your upper arm and are comprised of three heads, hence tri.
A long head, a medial and a lateral. The lateral and medial triceps are named for their location on the back of the arm and the long head is named for its size compared to the lateral and medial.
Studies have revealed that each of the tricep muscles may contain a different type of muscle fiber.
Thus it is important to incorporate a variety of different exercises that challenge the muscles using varied overload principles.
The triceps act to balance the biceps by extending your elbow from a flexed position to a straightened position.
Triceps Tip 1 – grip
To aid with muscle contraction of the triceps grip the TRX handle as hard as possible in your hands and squeeze your whole arm throughout the exercise.
Triceps Tip – 2
The tricep is a hard muscle to intentionally contract and feel throughout a range of motion when you first begin exercising it.
It becomes easier at the very top of the exercise, as an example, this would be when your arms are fully outstretched on a TRX Skullcrusher.
For this reason I recommend at the top of tricep exercises you really mentally dig in and focus on the contraction and squeezing the muscle while you are at this holding point in the range of motion.
Pushing your hands / handles together at this point may help to achieve this goal.
Triceps Tip 3 – Feet position
The triceps exhaust quickly, an exercise may feel easy as you begin but don’t be fooled into increasing the intensity by changing your foot placement too soon. Work through all the reps first to see how they feel towards the back end of the set.
Let’s get to it
Coach Adam
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