Home Grown Biceps

How to Build a Set of Baseball-Size Bi's With Nothing but Dumbbells

‘Show me your muscle.’ That request prompts you to roll up your sleeve and flex your forearm, right? Of course not’unless you’re Popeye. Everyone knows your ‘muscle’ is your biceps, so when somebody asks to see it, be proud, cock that arm and display a jutting, jagged peak that’s hard as a rock.

Even when it’s hanging down by your side relaxed, your biceps can look impressive. True, it’s the triceps muscle that fills out your shirtsleeve with its sweeping girth, but it’s the biceps that sports that wicked vein running from delt to forearm. If you’ve got complete development, your biceps also juts up from the elbow joint at the insertion. Building the underlying brachialis muscle gets you that lower-biceps impressiveness.

You say none of the above sounds familiar, and your biceps look more like prunes than baseballs? The antidote to pruny, puny biceps is coming up, and all the prescription requires is a set of dumbbells and a bench’oh, and some hard, consistent work on your part, of course.

That’s good news for bodybuilders who train at home, but you may want to add some equipment before tackling the upcoming routine. The program includes drop sets, which means moving from one set of dumbbells to a lighter set without any rest. It’s an important component of quick results, as you’ll soon see. If you have a rack of fixed dumbbells at your disposal, drop sets won’t be a problem. If all you have are those adjustable dumbbells with the screw-held collars, however, get a few extra pairs of them’and extra plates, too, if you need them’so you can preset the weight. Fumbling around with collars and plates during your biceps training can make the workout long and less effective at best and dangerous at worse’when a collar comes off, sending a 10-pound plate careening toward your big toe or into your lap during seated curls. (Other bodyparts besides your biceps could swell up to the size of baseballs. Ouch!)

One type of dumbbell you may consider for your home gym solves a number of problems, not just the drop-set one. Selectorized sets, such as the PowerBlock, will turn you into a quick-change artist in no time: To change the poundage, you simply return each PowerBlock dumbbell to its rack and move a pin to select the weight you want. When you pull the dumbbell away from the stand, the poundage you chose comes along for the ride, and the rest of the plates stay on the stand. It’s an ingenious piece of equipment that should be a part of every serious home gym’unless, of course, you’ve got room for a rack of fixed dumbbells.

If you train in a commercial gym, just make sure all the dumbbells you need are ready and waiting for you when you get to the drop sets. The biceps routine isn’t complicated, but it does have a few innovative characteristics that make it brief but effective at packing on biceps height and mass.

1) Positions of Flexion. Most IRONMAN readers are familiar with POF, the concept of working a muscle through its full range of motion. The biceps’ range of motion is the same as the triceps’: upper arm next to your head, elbow bent’to hit the contracted position’moving down along an arc that ends when your arm is behind your torso, elbow extended, which is the stretch position. You use one exercise that trains the biceps at a point in the middle of that arc of flexion, and you’ve got a basic full-range POF program: concentration curls, standing dumbbell curls and incline curls.

The concentration curl is the contracted-position exercise. Your arm isn’t up next to your head, which would be the ideal position, but you get close without having to hang by your knees from the ceiling. The key is to keep your torso parallel to the floor and your upper arm away from your body. The standing or seated dumbbell curl is the midrange movement. Your upper arms are slightly in front of your torso, and you bring in the front delts and back somewhat to help the biceps drive up heavy weight. That’s muscle synergy, and it’s the reason it’s considered one of the best biceps mass-building exercises.

The incline dumbbell curl is the stretch-position movement. When your arm is extended, hanging down past the plane of your torso, you get a distinct pull in the biceps muscle. That elongation triggers more fiber recruitment as well as anabolic reactions in the target muscle. It can also cause some soreness, so if you’re not used to getting a full stretch in your biceps, go easy on incline curls in the beginning. Training the three positions of flexion provides you with everything from full, complete development to optimal muscle fiber recruitment. Combine POF with the unique unilateral muscle stimulation of dumbbells, and you have an incredibly efficient mass-building routine that doesn’t require a lot of sets to build maximum muscle and detail. There’s a reason Arnold’s favorite biceps routine was dumbbell curls, incline curls and concentration curls: He knew instinctively that those three exercises got to as many fibers as possible and gave his biceps the height, thickness and size he was after. Did they ever! His biceps were among the best, even by today’s outlandish standards.

2) Postactivation. While POF provides extra fiber recruitment via its stretch-position exercise and activating the myotatic, or stretch, reflex, postactivation can give you even more. One of the most common ways to use it is in modified-superset fashion, combining a compound, or midrange-position, exercise with an isolation, or contracted-position, movement. To use postactivation in the POF biceps routine, you do dumbbell curls and concentration curls, alternating exercises with a one-minute rest between sets. The isolated concentration curls help recruit more motor units in the biceps, getting your central nervous system up to speed so the dumbbell curls are effective.

3) Time under tension. So many bodybuilders never do sets that last more than 30 seconds, and they miss a lot of development that can occur with extended time under tension. In fact, it may be the biggest reason so many bodybuilders get sluggish gains’they get stuck in the rut of eight to 12 reps, 20 to 30 seconds of time under tension. It appears that in many bodybuilders a number of fast-twitch fibers thrive on extended tension times. Hardgainers need to pay special attention because they tend to have more of those endurance-oriented fast-twitch fibers. Rather than do higher reps, a better way to get at those fibers is with drop sets. You do a set on which you reach failure at around rep eight; then you lower the weight and continue repping out, hitting failure at around seven reps. Adding the tension times of those two back-to-back sets together, you get anywhere from 35 to 60 seconds, depending on your rep speed. Drop sets provide a new target-muscle stress for most trainees, which should translate into some new size almost immediately.

Here’s the routine:

Standing dumbbell curls
(progressively heavier
warmup sets) 2 x 8
Concentration curls
(warmup) 1 x 8
Modified P.A. superset
Standing dumbbell
curls 3 x 8
Concentration curls 2 x 8
Incline dumbbell
curls (drop set) 2 x 8(6)
Aftershock superset (brachialis)
Incline hammer curls 1 x 8
Standing hammer curls 1 x 8

Here are a few tips to get the most out of those exercises:

Standing dumbbell curls. Hold the dumbbells at arm’s length in front of your thighs with your palms facing forward. Curl the dumbbells up with a slight heave to get muscle teamwork. Don’t throw the weight up. You do want the biceps to get the brunt of the work, not your lower back. When the dumbbells reach your front deltoids, immediately lower the ‘bells slowly back to the arms-extended position, and without a pause begin the next rep. You can allow your upper arms to move forward somewhat to enhance muscle teamwork, but remember: Don’t turn the exercise into a curl-grip dumbbell power clean. You should hit failure at around rep eight. Take a one-minute break to clear some of the lactic acid and then go on to concentration curls.

Concentration curls. You can do these standing or seated. For the standing version, an Arnold favorite, bend over at the waist so your torso is parallel to the floor. Curl the dumbbell from an arm-extended position up to your opposite shoulder. Twist your little finger up as high as possible and squeeze for a count to enhance biceps contraction before you lower the dumbbell. Lower slowly’a two-seconds-up, two-seconds-down cadence is about right. As soon as your arm reaches full extension, begin the next rep. Try to keep your upper arm stationary throughout the set and keep tension on the biceps. Once you hit failure, around rep eight, switch arms and work your other biceps. Then take a one-minute break and repeat the modified postactivation superset. Note that you will go through two rounds and then end with one last set of standing dumbbell curls to take advantage of the postactivation created by the last set of concentration curls. Your bi’s should be toast, but you still need to train the stretch position to complete the full-range-of-motion chain and ensure maximum fiber stimulation.

Incline curls. Position yourself on a 45-degree incline bench with a dumbbell in each hand. With your palms facing forward, curl the dumbbells up till they reach your front deltoid. Without a pause, lower under control, and as soon as your arms are fully extended and you feel a severe stretch in your biceps, begin the next rep. Remember, no pause at the top or bottom, and keep moving’two seconds up, two seconds down. When you reach failure at around rep eight, grab a lighter set of dumbbells’or if you’re using PowerBlock dumbbells, put them on the stand and move the pins up one or two plates’then continue to rep out, hitting failure at around rep six. Rest for one to 1 1/2 minutes and then repeat the drop set.

Incline hammer curls supersetted with standing hammer curls. Your final movements will give your biceps new peaks by stressing the underlying brachialis muscles. When you develop those muscles, which run under the biceps and down into the forearm, you push the biceps up to new heights. It’s like building a thicker foundation for your biceps, which makes them rise to the occasion. Do the incline hammer curls just as you did regular incline curls, only keep your thumbs up throughout the entire set. Once you reach failure at around the eighth rep, stand up and continue to rep out with standing hammer curls. You’re extending the set for more tension time. Some trainees may find that the same weight is too heavy for standing hammers. In that case you can decrease the weight in order to get at least six reps. Just move the pins in the PowerBlock or have a pair of lighter dumbbells standing by.

That’s only seven work sets for biceps and two for your brachialis muscles, but they’ll blast an extreme number of fast-twitch fibers’thanks to POF and postactivation. Get ready for some incredible new growth in your biceps and a set of jagged, jutting peaks reminiscent of the High Sierras. It’s a biceps big bang that will turn molehills into mountains.

Note: You can use the above routine for biceps specialization in the programs described in ‘Bodybuilding for Dumbbells’ in the February ’02 IRONMAN. Simply substitute the new biceps workout for the biceps exercises listed. Do your triceps exercise before your biceps workout. You may want to decrease sets for a few other exercises in the workout as well to compensate for the extra biceps sets.

Editor’s note: To order equipment, books or videos, call Home Gym Warehouse at 1-800-447-0008 or visit www.home-gym.com. IM

Home Grown Biceps

‘Show me your muscle.’ That request prompts you to roll up your sleeve and flex your forearm, right? Of course not’unless you’re Popeye. Everyone knows your ‘muscle’ is your biceps, so when somebody asks to see it, be proud, cock that arm and display a jutting, jagged peak that’s hard as a rock.

Even when it’s hanging down by your side relaxed, your biceps can look impressive. True, it’s the triceps muscle that fills out your shirtsleeve with its sweeping girth, but it’s the biceps that sports that wicked vein running from delt to forearm. If you’ve got complete development, your biceps also juts up from the elbow joint at the insertion. Building the underlying brachialis muscle gets you that lower-biceps impressiveness.

You say none of the above sounds familiar, and your biceps look more like prunes than baseballs? The antidote to pruny, puny biceps is coming up, and all the prescription requires is a set of dumbbells and a bench’oh, and some hard, consistent work on your part, of course.

That’s good news for bodybuilders who train at home, but you may want to add some equipment before tackling the upcoming routine. The program includes drop sets, which means moving from one set of dumbbells to a lighter set without any rest. It’s an important component of quick results, as you’ll soon see. If you have a rack of fixed dumbbells at your disposal, drop sets won’t be a problem. If all you have are those adjustable dumbbells with the screw-held collars, however, get a few extra pairs of them’and extra plates, too, if you need them’so you can preset the weight. Fumbling around with collars and plates during your biceps training can make the workout long and less effective at best and dangerous at worse’when a collar comes off, sending a 10-pound plate careening toward your big toe or into your lap during seated curls. (Other bodyparts besides your biceps could swell up to the size of baseballs. Ouch!)

One type of dumbbell you may consider for your home gym solves a number of problems, not just the drop-set one. Selectorized sets, such as the PowerBlock, will turn you into a quick-change artist in no time: To change the poundage, you simply return each PowerBlock dumbbell to its rack and move a pin to select the weight you want. When you pull the dumbbell away from the stand, the poundage you chose comes along for the ride, and the rest of the plates stay on the stand. It’s an ingenious piece of equipment that should be a part of every serious home gym’unless, of course, you’ve got room for a rack of fixed dumbbells.

If you train in a commercial gym, just make sure all the dumbbells you need are ready and waiting for you when you get to the drop sets. The biceps routine isn’t complicated, but it does have a few innovative characteristics that make it brief but effective at packing on biceps height and mass.

1) Positions of Flexion. Most IRONMAN readers are familiar with POF, the concept of working a muscle through its full range of motion. The biceps’ range of motion is the same as the triceps’: upper arm next to your head, elbow bent’to hit the contracted position’moving down along an arc that ends when your arm is behind your torso, elbow extended, which is the stretch position. You use one exercise that trains the biceps at a point in the middle of that arc of flexion, and you’ve got a basic full-range POF program: concentration curls, standing dumbbell curls and incline curls.

The concentration curl is the contracted-position exercise. Your arm isn’t up next to your head, which would be the ideal position, but you get close without having to hang by your knees from the ceiling. The key is to keep your torso parallel to the floor and your upper arm away from your body. The standing or seated dumbbell curl is the midrange movement. Your upper arms are slightly in front of your torso, and you bring in the front delts and back somewhat to help the biceps drive up heavy weight. That’s muscle synergy, and it’s the reason it’s considered one of the best biceps mass-building exercises.

The incline dumbbell curl is the stretch-position movement. When your arm is extended, hanging down past the plane of your torso, you get a distinct pull in the biceps muscle. That elongation triggers more fiber recruitment as well as anabolic reactions in the target muscle. It can also cause some soreness, so if you’re not used to getting a full stretch in your biceps, go easy on incline curls in the beginning. Training the three positions of flexion provides you with everything from full, complete development to optimal muscle fiber recruitment. Combine POF with the unique unilateral muscle stimulation of dumbbells, and you have an incredibly efficient mass-building routine that doesn’t require a lot of sets to build maximum muscle and detail. There’s a reason Arnold’s favorite biceps routine was dumbbell curls, incline curls and concentration curls: He knew instinctively that those three exercises got to as many fibers as possible and gave his biceps the height, thickness and size he was after. Did they ever! His biceps were among the best, even by today’s outlandish standards.

2) Postactivation. While POF provides extra fiber recruitment via its stretch-position exercise and activating the myotatic, or stretch, reflex, postactivation can give you even more. One of the most common ways to use it is in modified-superset fashion, combining a compound, or midrange-position, exercise with an isolation, or contracted-position, movement. To use postactivation in the POF biceps routine, you do dumbbell curls and concentration curls, alternating exercises with a one-minute rest between sets. The isolated concentration curls help recruit more motor units in the biceps, getting your central nervous system up to speed so the dumbbell curls are effective.

3) Time under tension. So many bodybuilders never do sets that last more than 30 seconds, and they miss a lot of development that can occur with extended time under tension. In fact, it may be the biggest reason so many bodybuilders get sluggish gains’they get stuck in the rut of eight to 12 reps, 20 to 30 seconds of time under tension. It appears that in many bodybuilders a number of fast-twitch fibers thrive on extended tension times. Hardgainers need to pay special attention because they tend to have more of those endurance-oriented fast-twitch fibers. Rather than do higher reps, a better way to get at those fibers is with drop sets. You do a set on which you reach failure at around rep eight; then you lower the weight and continue repping out, hitting failure at around seven reps. Adding the tension times of those two back-to-back sets together, you get anywhere from 35 to 60 seconds, depending on your rep speed. Drop sets provide a new target-muscle stress for most trainees, which should translate into some new size almost immediately.

ALLHere’s the routine:

Standing dumbbell curls
(progressively heavier
warmup sets) 2 x 8
Concentration curls
(warmup) 1 x 8
Modified P.A. superset
Standing dumbbell
curls 3 x 8
Concentration curls 2 x 8
Incline dumbbell
curls (drop set) 2 x 8(6)
Aftershock superset (brachialis)
Incline hammer curls 1 x 8
Standing hammer curls 1 x 8

Here are a few tips to get the most out of those exercises:

Standing dumbbell curls. Hold the dumbbells at arm’s length in front of your thighs with your palms facing forward. Curl the dumbbells up with a slight heave to get muscle teamwork. Don’t throw the weight up. You do want the biceps to get the brunt of the work, not your lower back. When the dumbbells reach your front deltoids, immediately lower the ‘bells slowly back to the arms-extended position, and without a pause begin the next rep. You can allow your upper arms to move forward somewhat to enhance muscle teamwork, but remember: Don’t turn the exercise into a curl-grip dumbbell power clean. You should hit failure at around rep eight. Take a one-minute break to clear some of the lactic acid and then go on to concentration curls.

Concentration curls. You can do these standing or seated. For the standing version, an Arnold favorite, bend over at the waist so your torso is parallel to the floor. Curl the dumbbell from an arm-extended position up to your opposite shoulder. Twist your little finger up as high as possible and squeeze for a count to enhance biceps contraction before you lower the dumbbell. Lower slowly’a two-seconds-up, two-seconds-down cadence is about right. As soon as your arm reaches full extension, begin the next rep. Try to keep your upper arm stationary throughout the set and keep tension on the biceps. Once you hit failure, around rep eight, switch arms and work your other biceps. Then take a one-minute break and repeat the modified postactivation superset. Note that you will go through two rounds and then end with one last set of standing dumbbell curls to take advantage of the postactivation created by the last set of concentration curls. Your bi’s should be toast, but you still need to train the stretch position to complete the full-range-of-motion chain and ensure maximum fiber stimulation.

Incline curls. Position yourself on a 45-degree incline bench with a dumbbell in each hand. With your palms facing forward, curl the dumbbells up till they reach your front deltoid. Without a pause, lower under control, and as soon as your arms are fully extended and you feel a severe stretch in your biceps, begin the next rep. Remember, no pause at the top or bottom, and keep moving’two seconds up, two seconds down. When you reach failure at around rep eight, grab a lighter set of dumbbells’or if you’re using PowerBlock dumbbells, put them on the stand and move the pins up one or two plates’then continue to rep out, hitting failure at around rep six. Rest for one to 1 1/2 minutes and then repeat the drop set.

Incline hammer curls supersetted with standing hammer curls. Your final movements will give your biceps new peaks by stressing the underlying brachialis muscles. When you develop those muscles, which run under the biceps and down into the forearm, you push the biceps up to new heights. It’s like building a thicker foundation for your biceps, which makes them rise to the occasion. Do the incline hammer curls just as you did regular incline curls, only keep your thumbs up throughout the entire set. Once you reach failure at around the eighth rep, stand up and continue to rep out with standing hammer curls. You’re extending the set for more tension time. Some trainees may find that the same weight is too heavy for standing hammers. In that case you can decrease the weight in order to get at least six reps. Just move the pins in the PowerBlock or have a pair of lighter dumbbells standing by.

That’s only seven work sets for biceps and two for your brachialis muscles, but they’ll blast an extreme number of fast-twitch fibers’thanks to POF and postactivation. Get ready for some incredible new growth in your biceps and a set of jagged, jutting peaks reminiscent of the High Sierras. It’s a biceps big bang that will turn molehills into mountains.

Note: You can use the above routine for biceps specialization in the programs described in ‘Bodybuilding for Dumbbells’ in the February ’02 IRONMAN. Simply substitute the new biceps workout for the biceps exercises listed. Do your triceps exercise before your biceps workout. You may want to decrease sets for a few other exercises in the workout as well to compensate for the extra biceps sets.

Editor’s note: To order equipment, books or videos, call Home Gym Warehouse at 1-800-447-0008 or visit www.home-gym.com. IM