Drake Arm Workout: Biceps, Triceps and the 'Guns' His Trainer Prioritized
UPLIFT IRON CLUBWhat Drake's Trainer Actually Said About Building His Physique
Celebrity workout articles often turn a handful of public photos into a precise weekly routine that nobody involved ever confirmed. Drake's training history gives us something more useful. His longtime trainer Jonny Roxx has spoken directly about the process, and the biggest detail is not a secret curl variation. It is time. Roxx told Elle that the transformation was built over roughly three or four years of consistent work, with individual goals sometimes taking six months or a year rather than appearing overnight.
That matters for an arm-focused article because Drake's biceps became more obvious as his whole upper body got thicker. Public training photos show plenty of curls, while GQ's breakdown specifically highlighted heavy curls and concentration curls. Roxx has also described periods where they moved from calisthenics and bodyweight work toward more weight training when the goal shifted toward adding size. The arms were not built separately from the rest of the physique.
Roxx frames the program around the job at hand. Touring demands conditioning and recovery; physique-focused phases can use more resistance training and isolation. That is a more believable model than a permanent “Drake arm day” performed unchanged for years. Keep the main training structure stable, then increase direct arm work when bigger arms are actually the priority.
Why Heavy Curls Make Sense—but Are Not the Whole Arm Program
Heavy curls are the obvious Drake association, and they do have a place. A curl trains elbow flexion directly, letting the biceps, brachialis and forearm flexors do work that rows and pull-ups cannot isolate as cleanly. The mistake is assuming that “heavy” means turning every rep into a full-body heave. For hypertrophy, load only helps when the target muscles still own enough of the movement.
A practical heavy-curl slot can be a standing dumbbell curl or EZ-bar curl for three sets of six to ten controlled reps. Keep the torso mostly still, let the elbow straighten comfortably at the bottom and drive the weight up without throwing the shoulder forward. If the last rep has a little body English, that is different from using momentum from rep one. The goal is progressive overload on a curl, not winning a fictional curl meet.
Drake's documented concentration curls also make sense as the opposite end of the spectrum. Bracing the upper arm against the thigh reduces opportunities to cheat and makes a moderate load brutally honest. Pairing one heavier curl with one stricter variation covers high mechanical tension and cleaner local fatigue. For most lifters, six to ten challenging direct biceps sets per week is a sensible starting range when pulling volume is already substantial. Add sets only if elbows feel good, performance is progressing and the rest of the program is not being crowded out.
Triceps Are the Bigger Half of the 'Guns' Equation
If the goal is visibly larger arms, a biceps-only plan leaves a lot on the table. The triceps make up a large share of upper-arm mass and contribute heavily to the thick look from the side and rear. Pressing already trains them, especially on bench presses, dips and overhead work, but direct elbow-extension work can fill gaps that compound pressing does not cover perfectly.
Start with a press that lets you load the triceps without irritating the shoulders: close-grip bench press, a neutral-grip dumbbell press or assisted or weighted dips depending on your structure and experience. Then use a cable pushdown for stable, repeatable reps. Finish with an overhead cable extension if your elbows tolerate it; placing the arm overhead lengthens the long head of the triceps and gives the movement a different stimulus from pushdowns.
A simple triceps progression is three sets of eight to twelve on the main press and two or three sets of ten to fifteen on each isolation movement. Keep one to three reps in reserve early and push the final isolation set closer to failure. The broader Drake lesson still applies: direct work sits on top of a full program. If you already bench and overhead press hard twice per week, your triceps are not starting from zero. Count that overlap before piling on more volume.
Presses and Pulls Quietly Do a Lot of Arm Work
One reason celebrity arm routines become absurdly long is that they pretend compound lifts do not count. They do. Pull-ups, chin-ups and rows load the elbow flexors while the back does the bigger job. Bench presses, incline presses, overhead presses and dips load the triceps while chest and shoulders contribute. Roxx has named shoulder presses, incline bench, pull-ups and muscle-ups among Drake's go-to movements, which helps explain why his arm development should not be credited to curls alone.
This overlap lets you build an arm program around quality rather than endless volume. If your upper-body day already includes four hard sets of pull-ups and four hard sets of pressing, adding four biceps exercises and four triceps exercises is usually unnecessary. Two targeted movements for each muscle can be plenty.
Exercise order matters too. If bigger arms are the priority, occasionally move direct work earlier instead of always saving it for the exhausted final fifteen minutes. Do your main press and pull, then train biceps and triceps before lower-priority accessories. Another option is a short arm-focused session on a day that does not interfere with heavy pressing or pulling. Thirty to forty minutes of focused work can beat a two-hour marathon because the sets stay harder, cleaner and easier to recover from.
A Drake-Inspired Arm Session That Is Actually Programmable
Instead of pretending this is Drake's private current routine, use the documented themes—heavy curls, stricter curls, pressing, pulling and consistent resistance training—to build a session a normal lifter can progress. Start with close-grip bench press for three sets of six to ten. Follow with a standing dumbbell or EZ-bar curl for three sets of six to ten. Those are the heavier anchors.
Next, pair a cable pushdown with an incline dumbbell curl for three sets of ten to fifteen each. The cable keeps triceps work stable; the incline curl places the biceps in a lengthened position and forces lighter, cleaner reps. Finish with two sets each of overhead cable extensions and concentration curls in the twelve-to-fifteen range. Rest about two minutes on heavier work and sixty to ninety seconds on isolation sets.
Progression is boring on purpose. Pick a rep range. When you hit the top of that range on every set with clean form, add the smallest practical amount of weight and build back up. If the jump is too large, add a rep or improve control before forcing heavier dumbbells. Run the session once weekly if your other upper-body days contain substantial pressing and pulling. If arms are a major priority and recovery is good, split the same weekly volume across two shorter exposures. More frequency is useful only when it helps distribute quality work.
How to Grow Your Arms Without Letting Arm Day Eat the Program
The final lesson is restraint. Bigger arms respond to hard training, but elbows and connective tissue do not care how motivated you feel. Add direct volume gradually. If curls, presses and extensions are progressing, keep the plan stable long enough to see what it does. Changing exercises every week makes it difficult to tell whether you are actually stronger or simply entertained.
Technique is also a progression variable. A moderate dumbbell curled through a full range with a controlled lowering phase can be more productive than a heavier bell swung halfway up. On triceps work, choose cable angles and handles that let the elbow move comfortably. The goal is repeatable muscular tension. If a movement consistently feels wrong at the joint, adjust the setup or choose another exercise that trains the same function.
Progress does not require turning every set into a maximum-effort test. On heavier curls and presses, stopping with one or two clean repetitions available can preserve technique while still producing a strong training stimulus. Isolation exercises are a better place to work closer to failure because the loads are lower and the movement is easier to control. Even there, the last repetition should still resemble the first one closely enough that the target muscle is doing the job.
Recovery changes how much direct arm work makes sense. If pressing performance drops, elbows stay irritated, or pulling sessions become noticeably weaker, the answer may be less accessory volume rather than more. Distribute the work across the week, keep exercise selection stable, and add sets only when the current workload is being recovered from well. A short productive session repeated consistently beats one giant arm day that compromises the next three workouts.
Nutrition supports the same process. Building muscle is easier when protein intake is consistently adequate and total energy intake is not chronically too low. A lifter who trains hard but never gives the body enough resources to recover can mistake a recovery problem for a programming problem and keep adding exercises that only create more fatigue. You do not need an aggressive bulk; you need a diet that supports training, recovery and gradual progress.
Track the lifts in a logbook. If controlled curls and extensions are gaining repetitions or load across useful rep ranges while form stays consistent, the program is moving in the right direction. Use several weeks of performance trends rather than judging a session by the size of the temporary pump. A huge pump can be fun, but it is not proof that the plan is better than one that produces steady strength gains.
It also helps to keep the weekly structure simple. One heavier biceps movement, one lengthened-position curl, one heavier triceps press and one or two cable-based triceps movements cover most needs. Rotate an exercise only when progress stalls for a meaningful period, equipment changes, or a joint dislikes the current choice. Constant novelty makes progression harder to measure.
Over six to eight weeks, look for more repetitions with the same load, more load with the same form, and stable recovery across the rest of the program. That is a much better scorecard than copying a celebrity photo or chasing a new routine every few days. The public training history behind this article is entertaining, but the principle behind bigger arms is not mysterious: consistent resistance training, compounds that build the whole upper body, targeted isolation work, enough recovery and a progression method you can actually repeat.
Finally, remember that arm growth is slow enough that patience becomes part of the program. Keep the same core movements long enough to improve them, schedule easier weeks when accumulated fatigue demands it, and let months of small performance gains do the work that a dramatic one-day arm workout cannot.
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