When 2021 Arnold Classic champion Nick Walker shares what his full arm training session in the gym looks like, best get the pen and pad ready to jot down notes.
“The Mutant” took to his YouTube channel on Dec. 13, 2021, to explain that, despite his arms appearing as though the Pokémon character Onyx is laid across his upper torso, he doesn’t “really do arm day.” However, as it is the most requested workout from his 101,000 YouTube followers, Walker filmed an arm day that involved supersets of biceps and triceps exercises.
Walker feels that his arms are not an area of his physique that needs improvement and, therefore, doesn’t dedicate as much time in the gym directly training them. Check out the full workout Walker shared in the video below, where his goal was “just getting a big pump.”
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At the time of this workout, Walker’s body weight was 285 pounds with the intent to get heavier. He still performs 20 minutes of cardio six days a week to remain lean but has increased his daily caloric intake.
The first exercise for Walker on arm day is triceps pushdowns. Rather than use a rope, Walker opts for an attachment with handles that allows him to get a tighter grip, which enables a stronger contraction at lockout.
Walker’s focus when performing his sets is apparent from the positioning of his headphones — they were on his head during the set, but not over his ears. He did not stop to adjust them as he checked the mirror several times, presumably to ensure his form was correct.
Walker’s trick to massive arms isn’t loading up super heavy sets. Instead, he takes shorter rest periods between sets, ups the volume, and “squeezes” at full extension. This isn’t only an effective means for achieving his desired aesthetic, it also lowers his risk of tweaking his elbow joints.
Walker’s first biceps exercise of the workout is cable curls with a “cast handle.” It is similar to a regular handle attachment, except the grip is much thicker, offering more work to the forearms to maintain a proper grip (think Fat Gripz). His headphones remained off his ears as the striations in his arms bulged.
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Moving back to triceps, Walker suited up an EZ-curl bar with a 45-pound weight plate on each sleeve and repped out skull crushers. Walker finds a wider grip more comfortable. His first set consisted of 15 reps, and he didn’t have a set number of reps in mind for his second set. Walker was open about how he calibrated his workout based on feel. He had ideas for what to do but it did not appear he had set programming.
Bouncing back to biceps, Walker stood up, grabbed the EZ-curl bar loaded with the same weights, and used it for more biceps curls. He finally dispatched the headphones. It seemed that Walker was going to failure on every set — a method four-time Mr. Olympia Jay Cutler told four-time World’s Strongest Man champion Brian Shaw was effective for him when they trained together.
Walker headed back to the cable machine for more triceps pushdowns — this time with an EZ-bar attachment. For his second set, he swapped the attachment for a lat pulldown bar for a wider, more comfortable grip. It’s not clear how many sets he performed but the camera angle showed him repping to failure, lowering the weight, and repping to failure again without any rest in between.
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Walker’s final biceps exercise of the day was preacher curls. He angled his body so that his massive arms remained glued to the preacher curl bench. For a visual of what Walker’s arms looked like on that piece of equipment, imagine if a pair of the Pokémon character Geodude were facing each other and trying to toss the preacher curl handles overhead to the other side of the room.
Following his workout, Walker got in a quick posing session and called it a day. To close out his video, Walker said everyone responds differently to certain kinds of arm training. Still, he finds going lighter in weight and upping the volume allows him to maintain cleaner form, more acutely target the muscle each exercise is intended for, and better achieve that much-desired pump.
In an interview with BarBend, Walker said his goal for 2022 was to claim the 2022 Mr. Olympia crown. If successful, it would be an improvement of four ranks from his fifth-place overall finish in his Olympia debut in 2021.
Featured image: @nick_walker39 on Instagram
