The Sunday News
Simon Gama
One of the best mass builders goes fairly heavy, up to three 25 pound plates on each side of an Olympic bar as the last set. When you’re curling really heavy, a little cheating is okay. It becomes like doing forced reps, where your biceps are working as hard as they can and you’re just giving them a little help. But if you start swinging the weight up using your legs, lower back and traps, you’re just wasting your time and risking injury.
Standing Dumbbell curl
Another good mass builder. Some bodybuilders do alternate curls, but for mass building, lifting them both at once works better for me. Curl the weights up, keeping the elbows steady and palms facing forward, and try not to swing or cheat too much. I pyramid the weight up, ending up using 85-pound dumbbells by my last set.
Let me caution you again to do your own workout, not mine. It took quite a number of years before I was able to use this kind of weight and still train strict. Almost anyone can cheat 85 pounds — the question is, how much can you handle doing a fairly strict, controlled movement?
Dumbbell preacher curl
Preachers anchor the elbow, keeping it steady so that you can achieve a full, peak contraction at the top of the movement. Most preacher benches are adjustable so you can rest your elbow on pads between 45 and 90 degrees. I use the 90-degrees angle because it gives me greater stretch. For added variety, I’ll also use a barbell on this exercise.
One-Arm: Cable preacher curl
I do this exercise like dumbbell preacher curls. The major differences: (1) You get smoother, continuous tension feel throughout the movement using a cable; (2) Since you are pulling against a pulley rather than a weight, the angle of resistance shifts to the side rather than the completely vertical pull of gravity.
Concentration curl
I do this old- fashioned way: I sit on a bench, bend over and rest my elbow against the inside of my thigh. The feeling to get with this exercise is total concentration, raising the weight with a slow, controlled movement, being fully aware of what the muscle is doing at all times. Make sure you lower the weight under just as much control.
Standing one-arm cable curl
Using the cable, curl your hand up and across your body, much as you would doing a dumbbell concentration curl. Go for that same feeling — full control at every point in the range of motion, doing slow movements with your mind 100% in the muscle.
Biceps, forearms and recovery
The biceps are one of the fastest muscles to recover from intense training. You can go through a demanding biceps workout and be ready for another in as little as 24-36 hours, although I recommended at least 48 hours to ensure complete recovery. The forearms, on the other hand, recover very slowly, I suspect it takes at least another full day or even a little more to achieve full recuperation after tough forearm workout.
Although biceps recover quickly, they also tire very fast. Don’t do too many sets for biceps in the same workout. Most bodybuilders only need about 12 sets for biceps, and doing 16-20 is quickly going to lead to overtraining and lack of results.
Shaping the biceps
Some bodybuilders believe you can shape and sculpt the biceps depending on what exercises you do. For example, they feel you can develop an Albert Beckles biceps peak by doing lots of concentration curls, get more outer arm thickness with hammer curls and create a longer biceps muscle with preacher curls.
Granted, these are all good exercises, but I feel the ultimate potential of any muscle is genetically determined. You cant develop in a way that your genetics haven’t programmed you for, no matter what kind training you do. Arnold Schwarzenegger always had long, incredibly full biceps, while the biceps of Franco Columbu or Chris Dickerson were shorter. This wasn’t because they did their arm training wrong or didn’t do the right exercises. It was simply a matter of genetics, the type of muscle structure they were born with.
You cant change the basic shape of your biceps — you can only fail to train hard and consistently enough to develop whatever shape your genetics have given you. A curl is a curl and you need not go through an entire catalogue of biceps exercise to get whatever level of development you’re programmed for. I do a variety of different exercises for arms simply to keeps the workouts interesting.
Competition training Cycle:
Day One, delts, calves in the morning; fore arms, abs in the afternoon/ evening. Day two; back in the morning, aerobics in the afternoon. Day three; quads, abs in the morning, hamstrings, calves in the afternoon. Day four; chest in the morning, triceps, aerobics in the afternoon.
I use a four-day double split, training four successive days both in the morning and evening, and taking the fifth day off. At present, I am not training forearms, but formerly worked them after biceps with good results. -Additional information from online sources.
The writer, Simon Gama is a fitnes coach at Bodyworks gym in Bulawayo.
