Great training minds/inferiority-complex sufferers of Letsrun: how do I bulk up my upper body?

16 inch arms? You already look like someone that lifts a ton. That's easily upper 10% of serious gym goers. 18" are BIG arms, almost impossible to get naturally, and anything above 20" is that stage bodybuilder look. Now, if you've let yourself go and are now 25% BF or something then maybe you have 16" arms.

Honestly, as a new lifter simple linear progression is deadly effective. It's just like running, workouts need to progress. Huge thing is you MUST eat. Make sure that scale weight is going up or you want be gaining muscle and strength. Decent protein, 1g/lb of BW is a common recommendation, literature stuff recommends a smidge less. No need to go crazy with it though.

Big compound lifts are king for putting on mass. Deadlift. Squat. Bench. Make your form perfect. Move up in weight only if technique was rock solid. 3x5 and 5x5 both work. Start with the bar (for technique), add 10lbs to it every week. When that becomes impossible, add 5 lbs per week. Should be able to do that for 3-6 months if you're eating good. Which means now you're up to 185-250 on bench, 315+ squat, 315+ deadlift. From there you can go to adding 5 lbs a week. Probably can get another 6 months out of that. By this point, you'll have added 15-25lbs of muscle and be starting to look strong. Throw some accessories in if you're not totally destroyed after hitting big 3, ideally ones like: farmer's walks, weight chin ups, barbell rows, overhead press, close grip bench, incline bench, shrugs.

It's the same as with a new runner. If you're new to running you can do cookie cutter stuff like run 6 days a week, with some threshold/longer intervals on tuesday and 5k pace intervals on thursday and a long run on Sunday and as long as the workouts progress you'll make massive progress in your first year.

I'm gonna suggest that upper back and delts are at least as important as chest and arms for aesthetics, if not more so. If nothing else, you'll want to spend plenty of time on those muscle groups purely for the sake of shoulder health. Very hard to do too much upper back work if intensity levels and exercise selection are reasonably sane.

LM has some decent advice, but I'd suggest that you'll benefit from higher volume on upper-body work and letting the mirror and maybe the measuring tape (around the waist) be your guide to body fat levels. There's nothing wrong with having aesthetics be your primary goal, and you might need to gain some weight to get where you want to be, but getting fat probably won't help.

As far as set/rep schemes, I like a modified cluster set/density block arrangement for hypertrophy work. Warm up till you feel comfortably sweaty and "in the groove" for the movement, then a set in the 10-15 rep range with 2-3 reps in the tank, wait ~45 seconds, repeat, for a total of 7-10 minutes (pick a time and stick to it). It's OK to go to failure on the last set, but stay away from failure before then. Obviously, you won't get as many reps on your 2nd-nth sets as you did on your first. Bump the weight up when you get as many reps on your last set as you did on your first. You'll figure the rest out for yourself.

and as far as canova equivalents go, there's a guy named John Hanley who is, as Warren Harding said about Herbert Hoover, "about the smartest gink I know." A lot of his stuff isn't formally written up anywhere, but https://www.barbellhacks.com/ is his website.

If you’re “training for chest and arms” you will be as much of a tool as the guys that walk around planet fitness with a huge gut and massive arms.

Don’t have a back? Quads? Delts? Shoulders? Calves?

You will look absolutely terrible if you don’t have a balanced physique. Every single group. Nothing looks worse at the gym than dudes with massive upper bodies that don’t have the legs to match. I just started running but I’ve been heavily weightlifting since I was 14 (30 now). My upper body is very impressive. My legs? They blow away probably 95% of gym goers. All these dudes with big baggy shorts, while I’ve got these massive quads, hamstrings, and calves, all with veins in veins.

I could go all day with specific advice, but the thing you need to realize is you better train every single group. Your ACTUAL lacking muscle groups need even more focus than all the others, regardless of which ones you “want” to be big.

Sounds like I may not be your type, my dude...

But as far as your point about "groups" goes, I probably could pass as a light-heavyweight boxer if I bulked up my chest and arms, that's all I was thinking of. As I mentioned, I have a physically demanding job which gives me a good amount of core strength. I've always found abs to be more a matter of bodyfat, as far as aesthetics go. I could stand to lose 10-15 pounds, but that's all a matter of course...

Thanks for the solid post. I'm at 220 for bench press. If weight equals mass, that's the direction I want to go. I'm so new to this, I am not even sure if that's all there is to it, though.

I haven't done squats, except on the squat machine. I don't deadlift at all...yet. Good rational about building up in a similar way as mileage, and certainly, form is the thing to think about. One thing, though: I have well-developed energy systems, call them what you will, but I may not have a clue about neuromuscular stress and recovery. I suspect my recovery should be much better than the average couch-to-six-pack chump. Shouldn't I be able to make some comparatively immediate gains (in a matter of weeks), if I structure my workouts a little bit more than how one would coach a highschool freshman xc runner, relatively speaking?

What do you think?

I love this, bro. It reminds me of when I tried Igloi-type workouts, running. Keep the quality high in short reps after front-loading the workout, if I understand you...

If you're at 220 for bench with 16" arms, you're either built lanky with long arms (more like a natural puller), have unfortunate pressing strength, something is really off with your bench technique, or you're talking about using 220 for working sets of 3, 5, 8, or even 10 reps.

I'm also a guy with strong fitness, both aerobic and anerobic, and I definitely get the sense I have a recovery advantage over most other lifters. It's amazing seeing what a set of 8 deadlifts does to some of my lifting partners compared to how it affects me.

As far as workout structure, not really. You probably have bad bench technique (it's arguably most technical of big 3), have minimal squat technique, and haven't pulled at all. Which means that for you developing good technique is priority one. Bad technique = less weight lifted = less muscle gain. Also = vastly greater injury risk = missed gym time -> we all know how bad that affects progress.

So sure, you could probably walk in and bench 200+ for 5x5 and make progress from there. However, that's too heavy to learn good technique if you're benching 220. Go back, and start at 135 or even less. Make the technique there perfect. Treat every warm up as if it were a competition lift. When that's good, then take a jump in weight.

In terms of the actual training plan, it's hard to tell how new of a lifter you are. In many ways it sounds like a troll. 220lbs bench, 16" arms, etc. asking about lifting advice. Unless you're fat you don't get 16" arms without having spent plenty of time in the gym...especially when coming from a running background. Harkening back to that new runner basic plan, think about why and what elite runners do different:

1) They do more (higher volume)

2) They are more nuanced

Why #2? Because they want to train something specific. They need to optimize a particular race discipline (i.e. 1500) and perhaps they need to optimize a specific aspect of that (anaerobic cap, speed, etc.). As a new lifter, everything is untrained. Anything you do will bring you massive gains as long as you follow basic principles (namely progression and eating so that the scale goes up). So you don't need nuance in your training. As far as other potential differences one might be "could I increase the weight faster"? Maybe. And if you're technique is perfect then taking bigger jumps is fine. That said, linear progression moves fast. You might get 2-3 weeks ahead of where you would get with "aggressive jumps" vs the standard. Not a big difference. Finally that leaves recovery/volume. This is one area you might be able to get away with more than a novice. You might find, especially at first, you can do 4 days a week of lifting and still find yourself recovering (this will become less and less possible, especially as your squat/deadlift go up) and moving up to higher weights. Be careful, injuries can creep up, but if you're recovery is good enough then there isn't anything wrong with upping your volume a little compared to the classic 3 days a week program.

Focus on big 3, then compound accessories (BB Row, Weight Chins, Farmers Walk, etc.), then finally isolation/dumbbell/machine stuff. It's okay, but almost universally natty lifters respond better to moving large weights with big compound movements. It's largely the steroid boys that can do "fluff and pump" and see big gains. For non-geared lifters, it's all about big exercise and moving more weight, with a few supplementary exercsies afterwords as energy allows.

One other thing. "Entry Level" linear progression was good enough for Ed Coan, unquestionably the greatest powerlifter of all time. That was the bread and butter of his training plan throughout his career. It's simple, it's easy, and it works with deadly efficiency if you can plan your weights/jumps well.