Wave Goodbye to those Flabby Arms

– By Paul Lejkowski

Do you want to tone up your flabby arms once and for all?  The good news is that tightening up your arms is a very realistic goal.  You can drastically improve the tightness of your upper arms relatively quickly if you take the right approach.

 The cause of flabby arms is often due to gaining too much body fat throughout the whole body. As we gain more body fat, our body needs to find areas where more excess fat can be stored. And because we have fat cells all over the body, fat will inevitably be stored around the arms.

Some people naturally store fat around the arms, but in most cases, it will mean they’ll often have a large amount of fat all over the body. It’s highly unlikely someone will have very flabby arms but remain fairly lean elsewhere all over the body.

It’s quite possible for anyone, regardless of age, to turn those flabby arms into leaner arms. As a side note; please keep in mind that if you have been overweight for quite some time and the skin has been stretched for most of that time, when you lose body fat around the arms the skin will eventually snap in, but it might not look like it at first. With time and patience the skin should tighten up. In most cases, it will require to reduce your overall body fat weight. Therefore, losing weight from difficult areas such as the arms may require the eventual loss of a higher percentage of body fat because the body draws energy from all over rather than from one specific place. So even if there is regular exercise focused on the arms, it will often tone them up before fat reduces there.

How to get rid of saggy arms?

The best way to get rid of saggy arms is to reduce your overall body fat levels. You should not attempt to rely on spot reducing alone to remove fat in certain areas. Doing arm exercises alone will not reduce the flab around them. You may get some toning, but the flabby arms will return once you finish the arm exercises. You really should be looking at well-constructed diet as well as resistance training workouts, which will first reduce overall body fat percentage.

A well planned out healthy diet will be the key to this success along with strength training and cardio. As body fat percentage is reduced, it will eventually reduce the saggy fat around the arms as well. When a proper exercise regiment is in place (along with proper nutrition), the muscles will tone up and give your arms a leaner appearance. Building a little arm muscle will also cause the cells to use up the fat around the arm area to help eliminate the flabby arm look.

The best exercises for toning the arms are single-joint movements. Examples are bicep curls and tricep extensions in few variations. These exercises place direct stress on the bicep and tricep muscles of the arm causing them to firm up much more quickly.

When it comes to getting rid of flabby arms, you need to tackle the problem from multiple angles

TIP #1 Lose Excess Body Fat

Women in particular are prone to storing excess body fat in their upper arms.  In order to eliminate your flabby upper arms, you need to reduce overall body fat weight.  This means that you need to eat a healthier, well constructed diet.

TIP #2 Resistance Train

Again, I am not suggesting that you perform resistance exercises only focusing on your arms.  That would not make any sense, since thousands of repetitions of arm exercises will not help you get rid of your flabby arms.  Instead, perform a well-constructed resistance workout regularly (3x per week for 45 minutes), that over a course of the week will cover all the major (big) muscle groups. The resistance exercises will boost your metabolism (which will help you lose excess fat) and will also increase muscle tone. 

TIP #3 Cardio

Should be performed right after your strength training session for about 30 minutes at a very light level. Cardio alone is a great weight loss tool. Remember that we are interested in losing body fat and not just body weight. There is a difference between losing body fat and body weight (see my article in Silver and Gold, November/December 2010 issue). A healthy, well-constructed diet will focus on losing body fat and maintaining lean muscle mass. A calorie restricted (not nutrient-balanced) diet will get the scale weight off but in that process more muscle than fat will be lost. This will keep the muscles looking flabby. 

For some examples of bicep and tricep exercises that can be done right from home using a simple resistance band, please visit Silver and Gold’s March/April issue online at:



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