1. Train them too often. The biceps are a small muscle group. You don’t need to hit them directly every time you workout. If you do, you’re ignoring something important…
2. Don’t take into account the fact that they get worked along with your back. Think about it. Every time you blast your back you have to work your biceps as well. Any back exercise will hit your biceps. The work counts! By the same token, you have to take chest work into account when you are setting up to grow your triceps.
3. Spend your time on fluff exercises. Sure there are a lot of esoteric things you can do to hit your biceps. But you aren’t going to get bigger arms by doing lying overhead cable curls on a bosu-ball. Which leads us to the next mistake….
4. Ignore the basics. Curls, heavy curls. Real work for real muscles. When you do work biceps, work them already. Too many trainers ignore this and try to take the easy way out, primarily by…
5. Concentrate your efforts on machines. When you go into any commercial gym of any size at all, you’ll see at least five different machines, supposedly set up to work your biceps. While these machines can be useful, they all have a number of drawbacks. I plan to expand on this at length in a future post, but here’s the first one: You have no way of knowing how much weight you are really moving.
6. Ignore Progression. None of would think of using the same weight, or even the same set and rep scheme over a period of months with another muscle group. Do you start out the year planning to be doing 3 sets of 8 with 225 pounds in the bench all year long? That would be self-defeating, and no one would try it. So why apply the same logic to your arm workouts?
7. Don’t keep a workout log. Just go into the gym and pick up some weight. Don’t take into account the load, reps, sets, or rest periods. Again, none of us would do this with regards to our bench, so why do it for our arms?
8.Don’t measure your arms. What for? They’re as big as they are, right? Wrong. If you don’t measure, how can you know if they are getting any bigger? And if you don’t really know if what you are doing is working, how can you know when it is time to change your bicep workout routine?
9. Don’t let then rest. This is related to the above mistake #2. They really are a small muscle group, and in addition to getting hit when you workout your back, you use them constantly during the day, every day. If your bicep growth has stalled, it may be time to break out the workout log and take a look. Have you let volume creep up over time?
10. And finally, the single biggest and most common mistake people make in their bicep workout plan: Try to grow them alone. That’s right. It’s ridiculous to expect your arms to grow by any appreciable amount, if you are not building muscle elsewhere, and taking in more than maintenance calories. While we can work a single muscle group alone, muscle growth is a systemic response to overload. Want to grow your biceps? Hit your back hard, and do some squats!