If you had to pick one exercise to grow your thigh muscles, would you pick an isolation exercise like leg extensions, or would you pick squats? How about your chest muscles, would you pick cable crossovers or a bench press? Most people will pick the compound exercises (squats and bench press) and that’s the right thing to do. But that line of thinking goes out of the window when it comes to training arms.

Compound exercises generate more growth than isolation exercises. Bicep curls and all of their variations are isolation exercises. The best compound exercise for your biceps is the chin up.

To paraphrase Arthur Jones; ‘if you can do 20 chin ups and 20 dips, there’s not much more you can do for your arms’. Mr Jones may have been a thoroughly unlikeable character, but we shouldn’t let that blind us to his insights. A lot of people find chin ups hard, and they are, but that doesn’t mea...