How to Get Rid of Arm Fat in 3 Clear Steps

Today’s question is about “how to get rid of arm fat”.

The way to get rid of arm fat is to first and foremost take a measurement or a photo of your starting point.

You can take a measurement with a tape measure if you have one.

Just measure the circumference of your upper arm.

Or take a photo in a sleeveless shirt or sleeveless dress or something showing off your arms. ❤

If you’re using the photo method, you want your arms up in the air (as if you’re under arrest).

Not pressed to your sides or flexed.

So you can clearly see what’s going on with the arms.

And that would be your starting point if you’re using the photo method.

Before I go any further, I should probably introduce myself.

My name is Kola.

Just like Coca Cola.

I am certified as a Personal Trainer and Nutritionist.

I’m a wife, I’m a mom, and I’m just here to help out as much as I possibly can.

Take this quiz if you’re genuinely struggling with arm fat

How to get rid of arm fat – let’s continue

Now that we’ve talked about step one on how to get rid of arm fat, let’s talk about step two.

Step two is to do exercises that will help

• burn the fat off of the body.
• And secondly, tone the muscles specifically in the arm area.

Some great exercises that I recommend would be things like arm circles.

Arm circles are a really good exercise to just do your arms.

You stretch your arms out and make nice slow circles in the air.

Keep your arms parallel to the floor as you do this.

You will feel the burn!

Another great exercise to have in your routine for arm fat is tricep dips.

Tricep dips can be done with just the floor or a box or a chair.

Use a chair nearby that’s stable, not one that’s going to have you falling all over the place.

And also Wall Pushes are very, very effective for the arms.

They also do double duty because they also help the shoulders a little bit, which is nice to have.

I would also recommend in addition to that, jumping jacks.

And if jumping jacks are a little too intense, maybe you have knee issues, then step jacks are just as good.

And I would combine all of that with a nice round of boxer bounds.

Those five exercises – combined – are amazing if you’re trying to get rid of arm fat.

How to Get Rid of Arm Fat – how often to do arm workouts

Of course, you’re probably wondering,

1. okay, how many times a week should I do arm workouts?
2. How long should these workouts be?

I’ve got answers.

You want to make sure your workout is anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes long.

And you want to do arm exercises at least once or twice a week.

There is no need to do more than twice a week for arm exercises.

If you’re trying to get rid of arm fat just once or twice a week is enough.

And this is the fun part.

You’ve got to give yourself at least four weeks to start to see your arm fat visibly reduce.

At the end of four weeks, you either want to take another measurement with your tape measure.

Or take another photo.

Compare the before and after to see your progress.

If you want to speed up the fat burning process, this is a really good cardio workout to help!

How to Get Rid of Arm Fat – let’s talk about food

What you want to do is to make sure you’re in a caloric deficit.

And all that means is that you’re burning more energy every day than what you are consuming in the form of food.

Very, very easy places to try to get into a caloric deficit would be things like cutting out sugary drinks.

Examples:

• Sodas
• Diet Coke
• Starbucks runs
• Donuts
• Chips
• Cookies
• Anything processed, sugary, that is a combination of flour and fat.

Getting rid of those for a time would be really helpful to bring those energy inputs in the body down enough.

This will in turn help you get rid of arm fat.

It will also help you start to see some results from all the exercises that you’re doing.

Just doing these three things will get you to start to get rid of arm fat.

How to Get Rid of Arm Fat (the faster way)

Now, I have some unsolicited advice if you would be welcome to to to hearing it.

Basically, I just want you to know that there are faster ways to get rid of arm fat that don’t involve focusing specifically on the arms.

It’s very counterintuitive.

But I’m going to explain this real quick.

When we’re focused on the arms and we’re doing arm exercises, a lot of that work is going into the tricep muscle in the upper arm.

The part that jiggles when we clap.

The triceps, as you can easily confirm, is a very small muscle regardless of how long your arm is.

The tricep muscle is very, very small compared to, say, the thigh muscles.

That’s a much larger chunks of muscle on the body.

When we choose to focus more on bigger muscles like the thighs or or even the back, we are going to build muscle faster.

And here’s the thing about building those bigger muscles faster.

When you build your bigger muscles, those muscles are going to burn calories even when you’re resting.

So if you work on your thighs, your thighs are burning fat while you are resting.

Because your thigh is a bigger muscle than your tricep muscle, it will burn more calories when you are resting than your tricep muscle.

So the counterintuitive but faster way to actually lose arm fat is to focus on the bigger muscles in the body.

So that those big muscles are burning fat while you’re resting.

How to Get Rid of Arm Fat (Focusing on Bigger Muscles)

Over time, if you’re consistent, you will ultimately burn fat off your arms.

Yes, building muscle in your thighs is actually a much faster way to burn fat in the arms.

I told you this is counter intuitive – but it works.

Does that mean you never have to do arm exercises or that arm exercises are useless?

No arm exercises are still good because it is nice to have that tone and shape and definition.

Hello Angela Bassett, Michelle Obama arms. 💪

So arm exercises are useful for looking nice.

Of course they are also VERY helpful for carrying children and groceries.

But if we’re really talking about arm fat, not just definition and tone, the faster way to get rid of arm fat, honestly is to focus on the bigger muscles on the body.

And just watch and see your arms start to shrink and transform.

And you ain’t even got to do one single pushup.

How to Get Rid of Arm Fat: Benefits of Doing Arm Exercises

Arm Exercises are Targeted, Focused, and Motivating

One of the main benefits of doing arm exercises is that they target very specific muscles.

So if you’re doing arm exercises, you’re probably targeting your biceps or triceps your forearms.

And some people go as far as also working on their grip strength.

Because the arms are very important and usually visible part of the body it’s very very motivating.

It’s also very easy to see when you’re making progress.

Earlier on, I mentioned that the arm muscles that we usually focus on are very small muscles.

Therefore they don’t burn as many calories while we’re at rest compared to larger muscle groups.

However, on the flipside, the fact that they are smaller muscles is a benefit as well.

Smaller muscles are easier to change.

You can be doing squats for months and not see any visible difference in your thighs.

But if you do arm exercises consistently for the same amount of time you’re going to see a difference in your arms faster (assuming there is not alot of fat covering the muscle development).

For these reasons, doing arm exercises can be very motivating because – generally speaking – it’s easier to influence a smaller muscle

Arm Exercises are Quicker

If you’re doing only arm exercises, you can probably get away with much shorter workouts.

For example, if you only want to train arms, you can decide that you’re just going to do 50 reps of tricep dips.

You split it up into three or four sets and decide that that’s your workout for the day.

Technically you’ve worked your arms and it only took a few minutes!

Arm Exercises Create a Stronger Upper Body

This is honestly one of my favorite things about doing arm exercises.

They really do strengthen the upper body.

And as an adult, I personally just like the feeling of having really strong arms.

I like having the confidence that I can lift my bed if I needed to.

I can move the couch if I wanted to.

I can carry gallons of water if I need to.

Now do I routinely put myself through this kind of suffering? No, but I do like having the confidence that I could if I wanted to 🙂

Arm Exercises Can be Done Almost Anywhere

Most arm workouts can be done literally anywhere.

We usually don’t need a lot of equipment for them.

For example, if you’re doing tricep dips, you literally don’t need anything.

You can do them on the floor.

If you’re doing tricep extensions you don’t need special equipment.

Though you can use a heavy water bottle.

If you were doing arm circles, you literally don’t need to hold anything.

The weight of your arms is the resistance you need.

Now if you want to have a really really chiseled arms, you might need to buy a small pair of dumbbells.

But for the most part, a lot of people can get away with his bodyweight arm exercises, starting out

Arm Exercises are Hard to Overtrain On

Over training is when we go beyond our bodies physical capacity to handle the intensity or duration of a workout.

I definitely have over trained before.

And I can tell you from personal experience that it’s not a good place to be.

Because not only are you recovering from the work out itself…

You’re also recovering from the strain of going too far during the workout.

It’s horrible. Zero stars – do not recommend.

So this is definitely one benefit of doing arm workouts.

It’s kind of hard to over train when you’re just doing arm exercises compared to if you’re doing full body exercises like a burpee or wall climbing.

How to Get Rid of Arm Fat: Drawbacks

Potential for imbalances

Something that can easily happen to people that are training arms is that they neglect their other muscle groups.

One muscle group that is very often neglected, is the chest area.

Anytime we focus on a single, specific aesthetic, part of the body such as the arms, there’s always the risk of forgetting about other equally important muscles in the body that also deserve to be trained.

Potential for inefficiency

This is another side effect of the arms just being a smaller muscle group in the body.

Whenever we are training the arms, we are taking away from the time we could’ve spent on other muscle groups.

So, for example, if I were to do a 20 minute workout just for my arms and I didn’t do any other exercises.

I only did arm exercises for that 20 minutes.

I didn’t spend any time working on my legs. And no time was spent working on my back.

I also didn’t spend it working on my full body. It was just spent it on arms alone.

This is not going to be a very efficient use of my own time personally if this is a big part of my workout routine.

Of course it’s fine to do this occasionally, but if I were working out three days a week and two days were only arm exercises.

No cardio or squads.

Not even lunges or planks.

And all i’m doing is just arm exercises? That would be very inefficient.

Missed benefits of full-body workouts

This is a follow up from the previous drawback.

In addition to being inefficient, focusing too much on arm exercises can also cause us to miss out on the benefits of doing more full body exercises.

For example, there is just an overall sense of well-being that can come from doing cardio exercises for some people.

There is the increase in metabolism that happens when we build our bigger muscle groups for instance.

There is the overall balance in the muscles of the body that helps prevent injuries.

These are all wonderful benefits of doing more full body exercises.

And sadly can be missed if we hyper focus on arms too much.

Lower calorie burn

You might recall that I specifically said at the beginning of this post that we need to do exercises to burn fat off of the body.

And we also have to do exercises to tone the muscle in the arm area as well.

Following that advice will save you from this particular drawback.

However, I have still included this drawback here just for completeness.

Basically, if we’re doing strictly arm exercises, or just targeting the muscles of the arm, we are limiting our overal calorie burn from doing the workout.

Arm toning exercises have very limited ability to burn calories.

And if we really want to get rid of arm fat, we have to but calories somehow.

Arm exercises are very effective for getting the muscle to show, get toned and look nice in a sleeveless top or a bikini.

However, they need to be combined with cardio exercises to up the fat burning potential of the workout.

For example, a tricep extension is another reall good arm exercise. It will tone the arms nicely but will not burn as many calories as your standard cardio exercise.

The calories burned from doing arm exercises are very limited and this is a big reason why they have to be combined with other fat burning exercises that will help with burning fat off the body and arrms.