I’ve recently been asked to write about how to get rid of flabby arms. It’s been called lots of things: “bat wings, lunch lady arms, even chickens (you know who you are who calls these chickens).” It’s especially frustrating if you’re a woman who’s undergone significant weight loss everywhere else, and has even improved her muscle tone in most areas… except her upper arms.
Original source: here.
But before I tell you how to get rid of this, I’ll tell you how NOT to get rid of flabby arms.
Where most people go wrong when trying to lose those flabby under arms is they start doing lots of arm exercises. Months and months later, they have very firm triceps… underneath all the fat that’s still there.
So by all means, do triceps exercises, just don’t expect those exercises to get rid of the excess fat over there.
Toning vs. Fat Loss
You might want to tone your arms, but here’s the problem: improving the muscle tone in your arms is a combination of 2 things:
- Having low enough body fat to see the definition of a muscle
- Having muscle that are large enough to give the arm shape
You need both. Not just one or the other. The big mistake that most women make is using a workout routine for the triceps… which may increase the muscle size, but doesn’t really do much for weight loss.
Most Common Exercises to Lose Arm Fat… That Don’t Work
Here are 10 of the most common flabby underarm exercises:
- Triceps pushdowns: make sure you are as close to the cable column as possible. Stand with your feet shoulder width apart. Grab the rope, bring the elbows to your ribs, and then straighten out your elbows. As your hands come up, make sure the elbows stay glued by your sides until you finish the exercise.
2.Triceps kickbacks: your starting position would be with one arm on the bench, and the same side knee as well. This would put your upper body at slightly more than a 90 degree angle. Hold the dumbbell with the opposite hand, and raise the elbow up to be in line with the ribs. Now, straighten the elbow.
3. Triceps dips. Your starting position would be facing away from the bench or chair, with your upper body upright. Place your hands on the bench/chair, and from the top position, with your elbows straight, lower your body by bending your elbows.
4. Overhead triceps extensions. Start by standing upright, either with your feet shoulder width apart, or staggered, like in the picture below. Now, extend your arms overhead, and slowly lower them down, so that the dumbbell touches your back/neck.
5. Knee push ups
6. Biceps curls: stand with your feet shoulder width apart, and a dumbbell in each hand, with your palms facing up. Start the exercise with your elbow fully extended. Then raise the weight without lifting the elbow. Control the weight on the way down, and make sure you’re not swinging.
7.Preacher curls
8. Concentration curls
9. One-arm bent over rows
10. Lat pulldowns. Starting position: grab the bar, and sit down at the lat pulldown machine. Lean back just about 5-15 degrees. Now, pull the bar down to just below the chin, without swinging your upper body. A note about grip: if you take an overhand grip (palms facing away from you), you work a forearm muscle called the “brachioradialis”, whereas if you take an underhand grip (palms facing you), you work the biceps more.
The Fallacy of the “Flabby Arms Workout”
Most articles about this topic list these “flabby underarm exercises”, or something very similar, but there’s one little problem: they don’t work. Or at least, they don’t work for what you want them to work. Will they strengthen your arms? Absolutely! Will they get rid of arm fat? Absolutely not. Why not? Because muscle and fat are 2 completely separate tissues. Muscles can’t convert to fat, and fat can’t convert to muscle. Just because you have a strong muscle doesn’t mean there isn’t a layer of fat covering the muscle. It’s like asking the brain to do the job of the heart, or the heart to do the job of the brain. Can’t be done. Two separate tissues. Just like muscle and fat.
So the reason these exercises don’t work to lose fat from your upper arms is because they don’t target arm fat. They target upper arm muscles. This is true regardless of your age. Regardless of whether you’re looking for exercises for flabby arms over 50, or over 60, or for seniors in general, physiology is physiology – muscle and fat are 2 separate tissues, no matter what your age is.
There’s a myth called “spot reduction”, which states that if you build muscle, you get rid of the excess fat covering that muscle. But that’s just what it is – a myth. Spot reduction isn’t possible. Spot strengthening is. That’s precisely why there’s not such thing as the “flabby arms workout.” There’s not that much of a difference between a workout for flabby arms and a regular workout. The fact that there are a ton of articles and videos furthering this myth has a lot of women frustrated that they’ve done all these arm exercises to build up these strong arms… that are still flabby. Eventually, they just give up in frustration, and even consider a surgery for flabby arms.
With that out of the way, how do you get rid of the fat over there? Clearly exercise by itself isn’t the answer. There has to be more. And lucky for you, there is.
What Causes Flabby Arms
There are 3 possible reasons that you store extra fat in your upper arms (especially if you still have flabby arms after losing weight):
Let me start off by staying that flabby arms are not a health problem. Flabby arms are really a cosmetic problem, and that’s a matter of opinion. Having said that the following 3 reasons can be summed up into 1 big reason: excess body fat, that is stored disproportionately in your triceps.
With that out of the way, here are the 3 big causes of flabby arms.
- As I wrote about in my article on where you store fat and what it means, one of the reasons you store fat where you do is hormonal. Upper arm fat is almost exclusively a problem for ladies. Even overweight gents don’t complain about arm fat. They complain about belly fat. But even lean ladies will sometimes complain about arm fat.
Upper arm fat storage is indicative of low testosterone. A woman with normal testosterone will still have more fat on her arms than a man with low testosterone. To put things into perspective, in this article, I emphasize how we measure our clients every 2 weeks, and the importance of measurements. The average overweight man that we see has a triceps measurement of about 12 mm. The average overweight woman we see has a triceps measurement of 27 mm. The average lean woman we see has a triceps measurement of 16 mm. So a good chunk of the reason for upper arm fat is largely hormonal.
2. Another possible reason for upper arm fat fat (that I learned about in Dr. Lonnie Lowery’s T-Nation article) is decreased blood flow to that area. Less blood flow means less fat being released from fat cells. Ever notice how when you lose weight, some parts of your body lose it quickly, while others are stubborn? What is it that differentiates stubborn fat from the easy-to-lose fat? I talk about this in greater detail in my article on stubborn fat, but the answer is what I mentioned earlier: blood flow.
3. Genetics. Sorry, nothing you can do about that one. Fortunately, there is stuff you can do about the first 2. In a nutshell: both hormonal optimization, and strength exercises, followed by cardio.
The Truth About How to Lose Arm Fat
So if strengthening the arms doesn’t get rid of the fat on the arms, what does? As you can see from the above 3 reasons why fat is stored in the upper arms, the solutions will be based on:
- Hormonal optimization
- Enhanced blood flow
- Going back in time, and getting a new mom and dad. Sorry, I guess that’s not a solution, is it?
Method #1: Hormonal Optimization
The topic of hormonal optimization is extremely extensive, and personalization is needed for this, so I can’t give generic advice that would balance your specific profile. However, I can say that a lot of women are looking for the magic bullet, when the “unsexy” basics aren’t even taken care of.
In a huge chunk of cases, just addressing the bare basics will be all you need. What are the bare basics?
- Sleep. Go to bed at the same time on both weekdays and weekends (yes, 7 times a week). Ideally between 10PM and 11AM. No lights in the bedroom (no moonlights, no streetlights, etc.). No electronics in your bedroom (don’t use your phone as an alarm clock. Buy an old school, dollar store alarm clock).
- Eat about 25-38 grams of fibre per day. The most fibre-rich foods are beans (all beans are very similar in their fibre content – black beans, garbanzo peans, pinto beans, etc.), lentils, blackberries, blueberries, whole grains (not to be confused with multigrains, or whole wheat).
- Take a multivitamin.
- Look up your personal care, and household items on ewg.org’s Skin Deep database, and opt for less hormonally-disruptive products.
Take care of these, and usually in 3-6 months, you’ll feel way better, and lose some arm fat. If you want to take things up a notch, and get a bit more personalized, contact a naturopathic doctor, or functional medicine practitioner.
Method #2: Enhance Blood Flow
Ever notice how stubborn fat is colder to the touch than fat that isn’t stubborn? That’s because there’s less blood flow to stubborn fat. The solution is simple: increase blood flow to the stubborn areas, and then burn it. Fat loss is a 3-step process. Once of those steps is mobilization. That is when you get the fat out of the fat cell. Blood does that. But if there’s decreased blood flow to those areas (like your arm fat), you’ll have a harder time recruiting fat from those areas.
How do you increase blood flow to the areas of stubborn fat? Do any of the exercises in the first section of this article for 1 set of 25-50 reps. You really want to rush blood there. Then, just relax for 5 minutes. Stretch, hang out, etc. After that, jump on a cardio machine for 30-45 minutes. What the cardio does when it follows that pump-up set is moves blood around, but because you rushed blood to the stubborn arm fat, during cardio, more blood will go to the arms, compared to other parts of the body. You would do this 3-6 times a week.
That’s on the exercise side of things. On the nutrition side of things, on low carb diets, it appears that fat is preferentially recruited from stubborn fat. The total amount of fat lost on low carb diets is identical to high carb diets (as long as calories are the same), but the location of fat lost differs. With low carb diets, there is greater blood flow towards stubborn fat, and therefore more fat lost from those areas in particular.
Use these 2 strategies, and you’ll find it much easier to reduce arm fat for ladies (it’s not hard to reduce arm fat for gents).
Weights Exercises for Flabby Arms
If you’re using method #2 from above, the arm exercises that you should include in your workout routine, by rushing blood to those areas are:
- Triceps pushdowns
- Overhead triceps extensions
- Narrow grip bench press
- Narrow grip push ups
- Biceps curls
- Preacher curls
- Lat pulldowns
Home Exercises for Flabby Arms (Without Weights)
If for whatever reason you’re opposed to weights, or you just don’t have access to them, there are a few other options, like:
- Narrow grip pushups
- Bodyweight triceps extensions
- Triceps dips
- Banded chinups
- Banded biceps curls
It’s nice that no matter where you are, you always have your own body weight.
If you’re wondering “do I need ALL those exercises?” The answer is “no.” Just pick 2-3 of these do them 3-6 times a week, and get pretty good at them. It’s better to be really good at 2-3 different exercises, than so-so at many.
There you have it! The complete and honest guide about what it takes to lose arm fat, the truth about why arm exercises won’t necessarily get rid of flabby arms, and the strategies that will actually show measurable results in your arm tone, so that you can rock that sleeveless dress, like the way your arms look in pictures, and get rid of that pesky jiggle that embarrasses you so much.
