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

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.

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!