Make sure your bicep workouts aren’t taking too much away from your recovery. That’s right the key to successful arm training is often not to do too much. You want your arm muscles to be stimulated without doing so much work that you negatively affect your recovery. That’s why I think the best bicep workouts are really just a few sets a couple times a week. You can do these in a separate workout if you wish but I prefer to get my bicep work in at the end of my back workouts and tricep work is done on chest days. This certainly isn’t the only way to do things but it works for me.So how many sets and reps should you do? Well there are many different schemes that work 2×12, 3×10, rest-paused sets, but the important thing is that you pick one and then gradually increase the weight, reps or total volume over time.
One of the main difficulties with bicep training is that the biceps are such small muscles. I’ve heard about 6% of your total muscle mass. So you have to add weight in very small increments. You can buy those little magnet weights that attach to the sides of dumbbells. But those are hard to find. I like to use small little pieces of chain that are 1/2 pound or 1 pound (less than a quarter of the jump in difference between standard dumbbells) and wrap them around the handles. This gets the job done but not all gyms are cool with it so make sure to ask first.
I actually don’t think that the individual bicep exercises you choose to do are that important, especially for beginners. Just choose an exercise or 2 and do your sets. You should however, stick with the same exercise(s) for a few weeks until you stall and then change to some different movements. Try to go about one rep short of failure. This is sometimes hard to do. Because the bicep muscles are so small it’s very easy to go to failure every set and do too much. Do your main workout then a few sets for your arms and go home and rest.
Whenever your training biceps try to keep your shoulders back by pulling your shoulder blades together this will help to make sure your arms are doing most of the work. I hope some of these tips come in handy and help make your bicep workouts more effective. Be sure to check with your physician before beginning any new training program.
