When I say dangerous I don’t mean your arms are going to fall off or catch fire. No of course not. What I do mean however is that you can hurt the tendons on the inside of your elbows.
You can also hurt your muscle insertion points and can cause yourself to become very very sore. I first tried doing 21s back in the late 80s and ended up damaging the tendons on the inside of my left elbow. I had to have about six weeks of therapy before I could do curls again and it was definitely really truly painful. I could not even reach into the refrigerator and pick up a jug of milk
If you’ve heard of 21s and you do want to try even after hearing the above here’s how you go about it.
- Take your easy curl bar or your straight barbell, and load it up with the same amount weight if you would use for a good solid eight rep set.
- Now do single rep from the bottom to the halfway point. Lower the bar all the way to the bottom and bring it back up to the halfway point again.
- Repeat six more times.
- Now do another rep from bottom to top.
- On the way down, pause at the midpoint, and bring the bar back up to the top again.
- Repeat six more times.
- Now do seven normal reps.
You have just done seven half reps from the bottom to the middle, seven half reps from the top to the middle, and seven full reps, for a total of 21 reps. Hence the name 21s.
You’re going to be sore tomorrow. You may see a temporary bump in biceps size, but this is probably just swelling, LOL. You don’t want to use this technique more than once per month. It’s extremely stressful and you do leave yourself open to injury with it.
I would recommend, that if you do want to incorporate 21s in your biceps workouts, that you keep careful track both of the weight that you’re using and the amount of gain that you are actually seeing in your arm size.
If, after using this in your biceps workout routine for a few months you still think that their productive and worth the pain by all means continue. Just be careful, as it is really easy to enter your biceps muscle and supporting structures with this exercise.
