If you’re planning on selling tickets to your own personal “gun-show” you better make sure the crowd will be impressed. The last thing you want is to throw up a biceps pose (with a big grin) and get booed off the stage. Unfortunately, while almost everyone in the gym tossing around the iron is quite passionate about filling out his shirt sleeves with muscle, most are making vital mistakes preventing this very goal from manifesting.
And having big biceps isn’t just good for looking good—though that’s a big plus. Pumping up your guns will also help to make you stronger and improve lifts such as the strict curl and deadlift. Think about it for a second: just about every lift involves the biceps in one way or another, so it stands to reason that if you work on them then you’ll get better at just about every exercise.
But getting bigger biceps isn’t as easy as grabbing a pair of dumbbells and curling your way to 21-inch pythons—you need to follow a workout program that will get you the results you seek. On the flip side of that coin, you also need to be aware of what not to do during your biceps workouts.
We’ve tracked down six of the most common biceps-training errors that you might be doing right now and need to stop immediately. Continuing these ill-advised habits will only leave you with noodles for arms.
If you want a muscle to grow, you must force it to do the work. Bending forward at the waist and swinging so that you can use more weight will only serve to take tension off your biceps, which in turn will hinder your quest for bigger guns.
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Jasminko Ibrakovic
Leaning back
Leaning back as you curl is not only a great way to injure the lower spine, but to also take needed tension off the biceps. Tension is what makes a muscle grow, so stay upright throughout the range of motion until a perfect rep is no longer possible.
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Bojan656
Lifting the Elbows/Shoulders
Some lifters think that they will get a better squeeze in the biceps if they raise up the elbows/shoulders at the top of a curl, but this simply is not true. All this will accomplish is to bring your anterior delts into the movement, which once again removes tension from the biceps and lessens the severity of their contraction.
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djile
Curling with Forearms
In my 25 years as a coach/pro bodybuilder, one complaint I have heard quite often from trainees is that they get a better pump/burn in their forearms than in their biceps when performing all types of curls. For some, this is a case of having a strength imbalance between forearms and biceps that needs to be addressed/corrected.
However, for most this is an issue of technique. Make sure not to initiate curling exercises by first contracting the forearms—rather, keep the wrists in line with the forearms (or even bent slightly back) from stretch to contraction.
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martvisionlk / Shutterstock
Training Biceps After Lats
While there is nothing inherently wrong with training lats and biceps on the same day, if biceps growth is a priority then these two muscle groups are better done separately. Since lat movements involve pulling, they tax the biceps and thus compromise the intensity you can put into your curls, which will in turn hinder long-term gains in arm mass.
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Jasminko Ibrakovic
Ignoring the Negatives
The eccentric (negative) contraction contributes greatly to anabolism (the processes that ignite hypertrophy) and should never be ignored when blasting the biceps. I can promise you that lowering the weight over 3-4 seconds on every rep, even if you have to go a bit lighter will manifest into many more inches on your arms than curling and simply letting the BB or DB’s drop back to the bottom.
