You have been doing chin ups for months and you want to know whether your arms are getting anything out of it. Short answer: yes.
People who trained with nothing but lat pulldowns for ten weeks grew their biceps just as much as people who did nothing but curls.
Do both. Press first, raises after.
If you only get one, the shoulder press covers more of the shoulder because it hammers the front delt and trains the side delt nearly as hard as a raise does.
How to get big wrists starts with an uncomfortable fact: the wrist joint is bone, tendon, and skin with almost no muscle to grow, so it will not thicken much after puberty. The forearm right above it responds fast.
The strip nearest the wrist also answers to different training than the rest of the arm, which is why people grind out wrist curls and see nothing change where their watch sits.
Raising your heels about an inch turns the goblet squat into a quad exercise.
The heel elevated goblet squat puts the back half of each foot on a wedge, slant board or plate, balls of the feet still flat on the floor.
That one change lets your knees travel further forward and your torso stay upright, so the quads take charge and stiff ankles still reach depth.
Your pull-up numbers keep climbing and your chest keeps filling out your shirt, but your arms look the same as they did six months ago.
That gap is not an effort problem. Compound pulling trains the biceps as a helper, and helpers do not grow like targets do.
A goblet squat is a squat with one dumbbell or kettlebell held against your chest, feet about shoulder width.
A sumo squat is a squat with a wide stance and the toes turned out. Stand wider and you get more glute and inner thigh work, which is the short answer most people come here for.
Preacher hammer curls are a legitimate, wrist-friendly way to train your elbow flexors, but they are not the brachialis specialist most lifters believe they are.
The bench does something real. The grip does less than gym lore promises.
Flip your hands over on a cable pushdown and the internet splits in half. One camp says the reverse grip tricep pushdown unlocks the medial head.
The other says your hands moved and nothing else did.
Below you get the form, the muscles worked, the evidence, and a straight answer on whether this belongs in your program.
You do not need a pull-up bar, a machine, or much floor space to train your abs hard. Seated knee tucks work on a bench, a mat, or the edge of your couch.
They train the rectus abdominis and hip flexors together by drawing your knees toward your chest from a leaned-back seated position, and they are the practical stepping stone to hanging knee raises.
You anchored a band to the top of a door, stood or knelt down, pulled hard, and felt the whole thing in your forearms. Your back never showed up.
That experience is close to universal with the banded lat pulldown, and it is almost never the band’s fault.