2d ago

What the hell is going on with my arms???

So, I'm pretty new to working out. I'm deceptively strong, but I'm more into losing weight than strength building. Still though, I paid $600 for a year of gym membership, and I bought these things called Powerblock's, which are like dumbells, but you can customize their weight up to 50lbs (and you can expand them later up to 90lbs). So I figure I should just do some strength training anyways. Not like there's a downside, right?

So for the first month of this, I had a very wrong idea. I thought "go to the gym, every day, and just do whatever".

So most days were arm day. I'd go on a Monday, arm day. I'd go on a Tuesday, arm day. I'd go 4-5 days a week.

Since then, I've been told NOT to do that, and only do arm day once per week. As the muscles need time to heal between lifts.

Here's the thing I don't get. I've been doing curls, and another machine where you pull these pulleys downward, and set the weight. With Curls, I'm up to 30lbs for that. Sets of 12 is what I was told. I was doing sets of 20, but I was told that was too much.

When I got home, I tried doing this other exercise with my Powerblock. I'm sure there's a name for it, but bear with me. You stand straight up, with your arms at your sides, holding the dumbells. Then the exercise is, you raise your arms. Not forward, not towards you, but to your sides. So your body makes a T shape. Arms fully extended left and right at shoulder height, still holding the dumbells. and then you lower your arms back to your waist. It's kind of like flapping your wings, but in slow motion, and more stiff.

I can't do that at 30lbs. I can't even do it fully at 20lbs. I've been doing it at 17.5 lbs. But here's what's weird. Even from day 1 when I did curls, I could either do it, or I couldn't. Based on weight. My first attempt I tried a 50lbs dumbell. Mistake. On day 1 I kept sizing down until I got to the 10lbs, and then over the coarse of a week, moved up to a 20lbs, and now a 30lbs. But if I tried to do another weight that I couldn't lift, I just couldn't lift it. There's no pain.

But when I do my T arms exercise, even at 17.5lbs, there's pain. It's not a lot of pain, but there's pain.

There's no pain if I go down to 15lbs, which is the powerblock with no weight, and completely empty. So it's practically weightless. Which is what I don't understand. Why can I lift curls at 30lbs, but this T exercise not only causes pain, but I also can't even do 20lbs?

Am I doing something dangerous?

14 comments

It is OK to not know what you are doing but you really need to do some research and try and learn what you should be doing and how to work towards the goals that you have in a safe manner.
You are describing two very different movements here and they both use very different groups of muscles. Doing curls I presume you mean bicep curls in which case the muscle that is doing the majority of the work here are you biceps, this is quite a bit muscle in terms of your arms and so you will naturally be able to lift a lot more without any practice doing this movement.
The "T" shape movement you described does not use you biceps at all, this movement is using a lot of you smaller shoulder muscles. There is absolutely no way these muscles can lift the same amount, not only because of their size but just generally how the body works, this isn't a movement you do as often in day to day life and definitely not lifting any kind of heavy weights. Not to mention the fact that the weight is further away from your body so just by doing a basic equation the force it is exerting is far greater due to being double or more the distance from the pivot point. Even a well seasoned body builder would never be able to lift the same in these two movements.
The reason you are getting pain is because you are trying to lift too much for that movement with your current strength level. There isnt anything wrong with your body but the fact you haven't injured yourself already you should consider yourself very lucky.
Strength training is very beneficial for general health and wellbeing even if your goal isnt to just get jacked but you really need to take a step back and do some reading and try to inform yourself on what you are doing otherwise you are not only going to increase your chance of injury massively but you are also not going to be making the most of the work you are actually doing so you are wasting a lot of time and effort.
You want to be hitting different muscle groups in different work outs. You want to have both push and pull movements for the upper body as well as doing some core work. Don't skip leg day either you want to be doing both knee and hip based exercises within your leg days. For example when I go to the gym I'll do 4 days a week:
Vertical push and pull exercises for upper body.
Hip and core exercises for lower body.
Horizontal push and pull for upper
Knee and core for lower.
Everyone has different routines and goals but you should really put in the time to make yourself a routine.
Until you know what you are doing as well stop over loading and just lifting as much as you can. Take the time to learn the movements and proper form for those movements. Use low weights that may not seem like they are working you out properly whilst you learn proper form to avoid injury going forward. Either film yourself and watch it back or ask others for form checks on things you are doing and then slowly start adding weight once you have the form and know what you are doing.
If you over load with weight and it is too heavy for you, even if you can "lift" it your form will be off because it is too heavy for you and again you risk injury.
In terms of reps and stuff if you are wanting to build strength then you want to go lower reps with a higher weight so that you fail by around the 6th or 8th rep. That doesnt mean high reps is wrong, high reps will help you build endurance rather than strength.
Please please please go and do some reading because as it is right now it is obvious that you don't really have any idea about the basic mechanics behind what you are trying to do let alone how to most efficiently work out beyond that.
If you have that much money to drop on a gym at once then I'd highly recommend you seeing a PT a few times maybe to just try and give yourself a good basis of what to do going forward from someone that knows what they are talking about.
Working out and strength training is fucking great but if you injure yourself straight away you are going to drop it and then always have a bad idea of what it is and the benefits it could have for you purely because you were too eager and did it wrong.
Good luck with the beginning of your fitness journey and I really hope you can find your way as it can seem very daunting to begin with but just be very careful because if you fuck yourself up it could be forever with the way you've gone about it so far :)

Arm day is dead
You don’t know enough to do your own strength programming. Nobody does at first. Get a program from somewhere. 5x5, for example. The other site has dozens of starting programs. The RP hypertrophy app is a good option.
- I was gonna tell OP to check RP Hypertrophy but to be honest I just don’t think Dr. Mike is very useful to total beginners or even most people lifting purely for health reasons. Most of what he says is squarely aimed at bodybuilders and intermediate to advanced people.
  
  Team “Make Dr Mike a (multi)Millionare”!

You're describing lateral raises, and because the lever (your arm from shoulder to hand) is so long, you are more mechanically disadvantaged vs when you are doing curls. So it's normal that you can'f lift as much.
Different exercises can have different training frequencies. You can train arms 3 times per week, but deadlifts for example, work huge muscles and are much more exhausting, so once per week is typically enough for those.
Rep ranges for hypertrophy are typically anywhere between 8 and 30 (or more). So stick with 15lbs for the lateral raises and increase your number of reps over time. Once you hit 20 for example, then try increasing the weight and dropping the reps back down to 8, and work your way back up, repeat
The fitness wiki is a great resource, read up a bit and hop on one of the routines recommended there. It will answer a ton of your questions and also give you incredible results compared to just winging it

Like everyone else said, lateral raises. It’s a shoulder excercise. Another thing to note is that curls might seem doable at higher weights to you because if the dumbbell is too heavy you will compensate with your back (which you shouldn’t do). Lateral raises depend almost entirely on your shoulders. I’m an intermediate lifter and I use 20lbs for my lateral raises, to give you some perspective. My shoulders are a little bit fucked so that also is a factor but you’ll rarely see anyone pulling serious weight on lateral raises.
I think you would benefit from spending a few hours in the Fitness area of YouTube. I highly recommend Jeff Nippard. Some of his older videos are aimed at beginners and he’s overall very informative about what excercises to do and how and why.
Also weightlifting is the single best thing you can do for your health, short and both long term but if losing weight is your goal then the most important thing is your diet. No amount of excercise can fix a bad diet. And I echo the other user, get a PT at least for a month or two.
- weightlifting is the single best thing you can do for your health, short and both long term
  Weightlifting is great and important for reducing injury in old age etc but LISS cardio has way more clear overall health benefits
  
  Wrong. Look I’d have to link through dozens of studies to give you all the sources to reach that conclusion so I won’t. Ideally you’d do both. But if you have to do one or the other, weightlifting is better. Weightlifting is the closest thing thing we have to a fountain of youth.
  This should suffice for now:
  https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/strength-training-time-benefits/

Each exercise will use different muscle groups. It's therefore completely normal to use different weights, or to be able to lift different weights when doing different exercises. Have a look, the internet is full of diagrams of which muscle groups are used in which exercise.
As for the pain part: there is a realistic chance of overdoing it and damaging something along the way. Pain is there for a reason.

You’re using shoulder muscles for that exercise. It’s tough, you’re not doing anything wrong, aside from maybe using too much weight. You can bend your elbows some to make the exercise a bit easier while you gain strength, but definitely bump down to even ten lbs per arm. Bicep muscles are way bigger than your shoulder muscles, plus there is a lever action going on with moving your arms away from your torso which makes it even harder. That’s why bending your elbows can help with the difficulty.

What you are describing sounds like lateral raises. Not every arm exercise uses the same muscles and some muscles are stronger than others. Biceps are used mostly when you do curls, and those are very strong. For lateral raises you use you shoulders and they are weaker. So don't feel bad if you have to start with a low weight (or even none) the first few weeks and progress less fast than with other exercises, thats completely normal.

Sounds like a lateral raise https://www.setforset.com/blogs/news/lateral-raise
Those are small muscles in the shoulder vs your biceps.

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