The Sunday News
Simon Gama
I have always had great biceps. When I was young, they were my best body part. I trained them all the time, and they seemed as big as my head. I looked kind of funny because they threw off my symmetry, so I finally reduced my training volume from twice a week to once a month while I allowed the rest of my body to catch up.
Even though I have a lot of detail in my biceps complex as just one muscle, rather than trying to hit one of the two heads distinctly. When I train biceps, I concentrate on overall movement rather than the movement of individual parts of the muscle structure. When I train my biceps — or anybody — part — I think about performance. That’s always first and foremost on my mind. I think about getting a good stretch at the bottom of the movement and a strong contraction at the top. That’s what bodybuilding is all about.
Having said that you do need to give some attention to the brachialis muscle, which lies directly beneath the biceps brachii and helps give your upper arm overall volume when developed.
The way you hit the brachial is with hammer-grip movements, palms facing each other. That can be dumbbell hammer curls (standing or seated), rope cable curls or even barbell curls with specially designed barbell that allows for hammer-style grip.
I start biceps training with a couple of warm up sets and slowly pyramid up in weight. I typically do three working sets per exercise for arms, preferably 12-15, but still pyramiding up in weight even thought I’m not backing off on reps. With my peak weight, I strive to hit failure by the time I reach 12 reps or so.
During alternating exercises such as alternating dumbbells curls, don’t let the tension totally release on the non- working arm. When one arm is at your side and the other working, keep that arm at your side tensed.
During a set for biceps or for any other muscles group, your body should be fully engaged, all muscles firing — if they are not working, they should be busy stabilizing. That way, you keep your intensity high and your body primed for work. Allowing certain parts of your body to rest lowers your overall energy output and leads to a less productive workout.
Don’t bounce out of the bottom of a rep, or lose control of the negative portion of any repetition. As I’ll mention again in the upcoming triceps chapter, letting your elbows go to full extension and beyond against resistance can lead to elbow pain and injury over the long haul. If you can’t control the weight on the descent and stop just short of lockout, you’ve probably trying to go too heavy; back off the weight a little and focus on learning proper form.
While I didn’t include chin ups or hammer strength close — grip pulldowns in the list of alternate exercise for this chapter, they’re great biceps exercises, especially if you’re desperately trying to build more mass.
Chins provide an excellent way to put your biceps under maximum tension and allow you to use your own bodyweight as resistance. Grab the pull up bar with an underhand grip, just about shoulder width apart and concentrate on your biceps when you pull feel and see them contract as your elbows bend.
Experiment with different hand positions and grips. If you look at the exercises I have shown in this chapter, as well as the entire gamut of biceps exercises that exist, you’ll see they all have one thing in common: they boil down to your elbow bending against break stance.
But for simple variety, and emphasize different areas of your biceps, exercise variations come in handy.
Also, by just changing your grip on a particular exercise, you can add new twist to your training and perceptibly change which muscle fibers are being hit hardest.
On the seated dumbbell curl, for instance, you can go the traditional route, curling from a palmar — facing — you position to palms up at the top or keep your palms hammer style throughout or even try a palms down curl, which engages the biceps exercise, as long as a curl is at the heart of it, you’ re doing the job. -Additional information from online sources.
The writer Simon Gama is a fitness trainer at Bodyworks gym in Bulawayo.
