Here is his email:

When beginning a bicep workout routine; how do I determine the amount of weight
to use?

And here is my cogent and detailed answer:

Hi Rick,

The weight used is a function of how much you can properly lift.

When I say properly, I mean without swinging the weight, or moving any part of your body except your arms.
No cheating!
And no “arm-blasters” or similar.

Take a weight that you know will be ridiculously easy, say 20 pounds on an EZ Curl bar.

Do eight reps – with perfect form. That’s your warm up.

Now do another 6 with 30 pounds on the bar. Ok – based on how that felt, do you think you can get 8 reps with 50?  Give it a shot. If it is still easy, jump to 70.

A little trial and error will give you what we call your “8 rep max”.
Now that you have that, you have a good starting point for your bicep workouts.

Let’s go ahead and put together a simple bicep workout, based on an 8 rep max of 50 pounds:

Rest for 1 minute after each set.

EZ Curls 40 x 8 x3     (40 pounds, for 3 sets of 8 reps each)
Concentration Curls   15 x 10 x 3

Rest for 3 minutes

Cable Rows 100 x 8 x 3 – Do these sets as quickly and as close together as you can without sacrificing form.

This is a bit of a departure from a lot of workouts – usually you might end a bodypart specific workout with an isolation exercise for that part.
I like this better. Your biceps are already pre-exhausted with the direct work, and you are finishing them off with a compound exercise, in effect slipping in a mini back workout on the sly.

The 3 sets with a light weight won’t be enough to throw you off if your have back scheduled the next day – and if it is set for the same day, so much the better.
Remember – To get big arms, you need to grow all over. – don’t neglect the rest of your physique!

Steve had an idea, a theory, a way of looking at biceps exercise that he called positions of flexion.

Those of you of heard of this will most likely remember it as just one of 1 million other theories back in the good old Wieder days. But for those of us who read Ironman religiously, it was more than a theory. We actually made some decent progress with it.

The theory went like this: What you needed to do was work the muscle from each of its angles or positions of flexion. First you would work the muscle through what Steve called the midrange. This would be a movement that allowed the muscle to work throughout the range of the rep from beginning to end without an extreme contraction or stretch. An example for biceps would be a standing barbell curl. You would also want to work the muscle in the stretch position. For biceps, this would be at the bottom of a set of incline curls where you would be leaning back on a 45° incline bench with your arms hanging down towards the floor. The contracted position would be the last position you would work and this would be a position where the muscle would be completely contracted and bunched up. Think the top of the fly or the top of the standing barbell curl.

If you wanted to use this technique to work your biceps you would do it thusly:

First the stretch position. Grab a pair of dumbbells that you can easily get eight reps with and lay back on a 45° angle incline bench. Lower them to your sides and let your arms hang straight down to the floor. You don’t want to use too much weight with this, or you will be putting on more stress on your shoulders then you like. Curl the dumbbells up supinating your wrists as you go. You would not do a hard crunch at the top, as this will be taken care of in the contracted position exercise to come.

To hit the midrange of your biceps, a good choice would be standing barbell curls. Keep the crook in your elbow at the bottom of the movement so as not to strain the ligaments on the inside of your arms, and curl up, but not all the way. Stop with the bar about 8 inches out from your chest. Lower to just above the bottom of the rep range, and repeat.

The contracted position would be taking care of with concentration curls. I like to do these one arm at a time and seated. Pick up a dumbbell with your left hand, and place your left elbow on the inside of your left thigh. Lean forward, and curl the dumbbell up to the top of the movement. If you’re positioned correctly your bicep muscle should be bunched up and fully contracted at the top of the movement.

Positions of flexion has long since fallen out of favor with the bodybuilding masses, but when I do decide to revisit it, I feel like I’m seeing an old flame for the first time in years. It always gives me a great workout and I’m reminded of why it created such a stir when it was new. You may want ot consider making it part of your regular bicep exercise routine.

There is definitely something a little showy about a guy or a girl holding an Olympic bar and curling two pills and then some.

If you’ve never seen gladiator curls let me explain, and give you a little insight as to why they may have a place in your biceps workout routine as one of the most important (and fun!) of all arm exercises.

To perform a gladiator curl, simply take an Olympic bar and load it up with your current five or six rep barbell curl max less 45 pounds to allow for the bar weight. Now unless you can curl it least 135 pounds you’re going to look a little silly. But there are still reasons to incorporate this arm exercise into your biceps routine.

The Olympic barbell is 7 feet long. The ends of the bar have rotating sleeves. These two aspects of this particular piece of equipment provide with some unique characteristics when it is used to do barbell curls. The length of the bar forces you to use your entire upper body including your abs, lower back, and shoulders to balance the bar during the movement.

The rotating sleeves add an element of instability, which also forces your torso, shoulders and all the other little supporting muscles, tendons, ligaments and other structures to go to work and keep things stable.

I recommend that if you do this exercise that you keep your ego in check and do not load the bar up with your three rep max. I also recommend that you do not place yourself at risk for injury by doing this exercise in the squat rack.

Yes, I know, it’s a hell of a lot easier to load up an Olympic bar when it’s resting on the catches in the squat rack than when it is resting on the floor. But believe me, you don’t want to be the guy taking up space in the power rack when the really big guy in the gym wants to use it for squats.

To incorporate this movement into your workout, load the bar with a reasonable amount of weight. Something around your 10 rep max would be perfect. I recommend sets of 6 to 8 reps, done slowly and with good form. What were trying to do here is to take advantage of the geometry of the Olympic bar and get the most we possibly can out of the exercise.

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.