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

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.