Flying blindly into the college roommate selection process is a crapshoot. You have no way of knowing the sort of maniac who might eventually be bunking above, beneath or across from you until they’ve already plunged the knife into your chest, and this can have all sorts of ramifications on how quickly you’re able to adapt to college life (not to mention the amount of sleep you’re able to get).
Fortunately for me, my freshman roommate at the University of Michigan, Matt, was a very cool guy, who was also rather fitness-focused. Along with the computer, television and other amenities that he contributed to our living space, he also arrived with a set of plastic-coated dumbbells that remained forever locked at 32.5 pounds.
Occasionally, those dumbbells were used for some variation of a shoulder press, but the overwhelming majority of the time, they were employed for bicep curls. Since Matt was a former football player and I was an ex-swimmer, he had several pounds of muscle on me, and a few of those were packed within his much larger biceps. Matt was particularly proud of the veins in each bicep, which weren’t ever-present, but which would always emerge by the time he had finished a heavy set of curls.
What is the deal with the bicep vein?
For most guys who are fortunate enough to produce a vein that bulges prodigiously through the skin of their biceps, that vein is going to be the cephalic vein. This prominent vein carries blood from the hand, forearm and upper arm back to the heart. Whenever you have a blood draw performed, the cephalic vein is ordinarily the first back-up option to the median cubital vein if the preferred vein can’t be accessed for whatever reason presents itself.
I don’t care what the vein does — I want to know how to get it to pop!
You and a whole lot of other people. Folks are willing to try all sorts of silly tricks to get their bicep vein to shoot out of their shirts.
If you’re asking this question with a fitness purpose in mind, then you’re asking a question about how to become more vascular, and the basic recipe for vascularity is to increase or maintain muscle mass while simultaneously decreasing body fat. This is often a tricky concept to explain to people, particularly when it’s paired with a question about how to get a specific vein to emerge through the skin.
First of all, the preponderance of studies indicates that you can’t isolate the fat loss in your body, also known as spot reduction. This is another way of saying that you can’t simply lose the fat in your arms by engaging in arm-focused training and upper-body-intensive cardio. On the other hand, you can accelerate gains in size and strength in the muscles you choose to target. Certainly, you should want to train all of the muscles in your body so that your strength is comprehensive and balanced. However, in the spirit of answering your question to the best of my ability even if I don’t believe the strategy benefits you in the long run, you could expedite the process of cultivating a throbbing seam in the middle of your arm by focusing on the development of your anterior deltoids, your biceps and your forearms.
In essence, you’d be placing extra emphasis on all of the muscles your cephalic vein runs through.
I know plenty of ripped people who train those body parts, and I don’t see any blue throbbers bisecting their arms. Is there anything else they should be doing?
If they’re that obsessed with being able to admire the tube through which blood flows back to their hearts, there are a few other things they can do. Aside from cutting calories for the sake of becoming lean, they can also reduce their intake of sodium, which causes you to retain fluid and keeps your skin on the thick side even if you have very little body fat in the area.
From there, they can check on their progress toward making their arm look like a Google map by making sure they actually chase a pump during their workouts. This involves pausing and squeezing at the peak of each movement and forcing the maximum amount of blood into their muscles.
Again, don’t make this one of those instances where you find yourself searching for a shortcut to achieving one of the symbols of elite fitness without actually becoming remarkably fit. Most of the people you’ll find with a conspicuously robust cephalic vein are probably also going to perform admirably on the Marine Corps Physical Fitness Test, meaning that they don’t just look like they can execute at least 75 push-ups and 15 pull-ups; they can actually do them.
To put it bluntly, if you set out in pursuit of a giant bicep vein, and you pursue it with every fiber of your being, I’d be willing to bet that you’ll find yourself fit enough to meet several high-level age group standards related to health and fitness long before you achieve a juicy noodle running down the center of your arm.
Ian Douglass
Ian Douglass is a volunteer firefighter, lackadaisical Concept2 rower and SkiErger and is the worst masters swimming All-American in recorded history. He also helps professional wrestlers publish their autobiographies, assists businesspeople with the writing of coherent thoughts and has overhyped degrees from Michigan and Northwestern.
