I had not been working out regularly for a few months, and of courses it has resulted in the typical and predictable addition of a few pounds to my frame. But nothing serious.

So I thought I’d get back into the gym last week and hit it, starting with a back and bicep workout.

I figured that I would get rolling with something that wasn’t anything esoteric or really specialized, just a basic back and bicep bodybuilding workout. So I started off with a very light set of pulldowns and a light set of cable rows. I should point out that this of course was after 20 minutes of interval training on the hill program on a treadmill, and stretching exercises.

Anyway, I felt like I was ready to tackle some weight. I did three sets of 15 using a pronated grip on a wide pulldown bar. It felt pretty good, and I was using about 80% of what I previously used for this exercise. I rested for two minutes and then moved to cable rows, performing another three sets in the same fashion. Then it was time to get back to the pulldowns only this time with a supinated grip, essentially duplicating muscle movements of a pull up.

At this point in the workout, I felt pretty good so I moved on to my biceps workout. I did three slow and careful sets of eight of alternating dumbbell curls. Follow that up with three light sets of hammer curls, pulling the dumbbell across my chest. I love using this technique. It is a completely different feel from a typical dumbbell curl ending with the hand in a supinated position.

The way I like to do these is to start with my hands at my sides in a neutral position and then alternate my arms. I bring each end up without rotating my forearm until I can touch the top of the dumbbell to the opposite shoulder and then slowly lower back to a neutral position on my side.

Anyway, I finished up three sets of these and ended a single “burn out” set of concentration curls with a very light weight — at this point my arms were fried.

30 minutes later, back at the house and feeling pumped and energize. It was great to be back in the gym, and great to be doing a sort of traditional back and bicep workout. The problems started later that evening.

The inside of my elbow joints and attendant leading from my inside elbow joint of my forearm really started to feel stiff and hurt. I put it down to DMOS, although somewhere in my mind I knew better. I iced my arms down with some bags of frozen vegetables, took some ibuprofen and hit the bed.

When I went up the next morning my arms were essentially immobile. I could not straighten them all the way out, and I certainly couldn’t take much up with them.

To make a long story short, it has take a full week of ibuprofen, rest, ice and heat to get my arms back to normal. Lesson learned: you may still feel strong and fit after laying off for a few months, but this doesn’t mean that your ligaments tendons and joints feel the same way. They need to ease back into things just as much as your muscles do.

The female body will not develop big, bulky muscles like men without an intense regimen of weight lifting and diet supplements. Men build large biceps because of the male hormone, testosterone.

To tone and build your biceps you need to develop a regimen of workouts for the arms. The most common is the curl but there are numerous variations used to tone and shape the biceps and arm. A workout doesn’t have to involve expensive weights and equipment. Holding a can of vegetables in each hand or using straps for resistance while doing curls can be just as effective.

The bicep is the muscle on the upper arm that bulges up into a mound when you make a fist and bend your arm at the elbow with your fist coming towards your shoulder. The biceps serves many purposes but is primarily for rotating the foreman and flexing the elbow. It consists of two bundles of muscle that join near the elbow joint. While men’s biceps can become formidable, girls’ biceps will not become as large from a workout regimen.

well developed girl biceps

But there is nothing wrong with shapely arms on a girl. Not only does a toned girl’s bicep add to her physical beauty, it is a sign of a healthy body. How many times have you seen singers, dancers and models with beautifully shaped arms that suggest strength and beauty at the same time? You better believe that those are not just by luck but through consistent physical exercise targeting muscle groups.

There are female bodybuilders that bulk up their biceps to a certain extent and are usually extremely toned with great muscle definition. They use heavier weights and protein supplements to build their biceps. These women train daily and follow strict dietary and training regimens.

A girl’s bicep can be strengthened and built up through proper weight and resistance training. Since the bicep is actually two main muscles, each part of the bicep must be worked. Fully extending the arm and stretching the bottom of the bicep allows more blood and nutrients to flow to the muscle. Work out at the end of your workday and then go eat a healthy dinner. As with any exercise, warm up your muscles first before working on your biceps to prevent injury.

by Lizbeth LaPointe

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!

I have had a few questions as to exactly what they mean, even though I explain it in my arm exercise descriptions.

Pronation is the rotation of the arm so that the palm is facing away from the body. Here’s how to do it:

Do the classic “make a muscle” thing with your arm. Now rotate your palm away from you. This is pronated.

To supinate your arm, simply rotate your wrist so that your palm is once again facing you:

Easy as pie, right?

If you haven’t or you don’t know Greg is, he’s a guy from the Northeast that injected his arms with unbelievable amounts of Synthol in an attempt to make them look all swole.

As you might imagine he looks like some sort of circus freak – one look and you can see that no biceps workout gave him arms like that. He claims that he used  local injections of steroids into his arms to get those giant biceps, but anybody who has followed bodybuilding or has worked out themselves for any length of time will know that you have to use something totally and completely artificial to get results like that.

Well we’ve established that we don’t want to look like him. But what do we want to look like? How about fit, athletic, strong and proportional?

Proportionality or symmetry is the key to a good looking physique. And even though this website is all about getting big biceps, we still need to keep them proportional to the rest of our body. So what do we mean by proportional? Here are the normally accepted guidelines:

Neck, biceps and calves all the same size.

Chest at least 8 inches larger than your waist.

Your quads should be smaller than your waist. (If you don’t think it’s possible to have legs larger than your waist, you’ve never seen a picture of Tom Platz.)

Normally you won’t have a problem with your biceps getting too big for the rest of your body. In fact of course, the reverse will be the case, however carefully you structure your biceps workouts. But it can happen. Take this as a warning to keep your whole body, your whole physique in mind when training. I would bet that if you work out at the gym of any size, you will be able to look around next time you’re there and see somebody with large well-defined arms and a puny chest. Or maybe his entire upper body will be properly developed but his legs looked like pipe cleaners.

If you’re careful, and give it some thought you shouldn’t have any problems putting another a routine that includes your biceps workout and triceps workouts in conjunction with the plan to build the rest of your body in an attractive and symmetrical way.

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.

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.

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!

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