Building Biceps | The Best Exercises for Bigger Biceps

Your biceps are composed of two muscles, referred to as the long head and short head. They rest on the upper arm, starting their connection to the body on the scapula and running downward and inserting into the forearm, more specifically, the radius bone. Bicep muscles raise the forearm towards the shoulder, as well as the supination of your forearm. This means that its two main functions are to curl and pull, and the control of lowering the forearm back down.To strengthen and develop your biceps, you’ll need to do exercises that focus on these movements. Bicep training doesn’t need to be just curling alone. In fact, diversity and a spot of ingenuity may work in your favour. Biceps are a small muscle group, meaning you should not overwork them more than you would with larger muscle groups. A good example would be your quads, as this area is comprised of more muscles working together to perform an action, the movement is not as immediately exhausting – you have more horsepower in larger muscle groups so if you put a smaller muscle group to the same test, like your biceps, they will quickly be overworked and are not as capable of the same strength, sets and reps.

 

Which exercise types are best for building biceps?

Whilst isolated bicep exercises will work the muscles like nothing else, you might not have realised that other parts of your weekly workout plan also channel the biceps.Anything that involves pulling and curling will work your biceps. These include exercises such as pulling bars, pull-ups, rowing and climbing. This isn’t bad news if you’re working towards bigger biceps, but it means that you may want to factor this in when writing up your workout plans for the week.For example, on back day, you can pre-exhaust your biceps with some curls before working the back and then again at the end of the session. Our advice here is to make sure any arm-training days are two or three days apart. Your muscles need time to recover, build and develop.Biceps aren’t especially used in many sports. Think about it, any sport that does overly use a pulling or curling motion, also would not benefit from isolated, exhaustive exercise prior to game day. Tightness in the biceps can restrict the arms’ movements when running, particularly sprinting. It will also inhibit throwing activities, swinging, lifting and pulling movements. Because of this, we would recommend that athletes and sportspersons make sure they completely rest the biceps following any isolated or exhaustive training prior to a sporting event.When training the aforementioned long- and short heads, a simple tip is to alternate palm-up and palm-down exercises when curling. Another theory for training the two heads is to vary the width of your grip when curling. Try a variation of both short- and wide grips.If you’re beginning to train your biceps, four to six sets, twice a week is recommended. You could increase this to 10 to 12 when you feel you’re advancing and know your body’s capabilities and recovery tendencies.

 

Bicep-Building Exercises

Please introduce this section. It will be a list of recommended exercises specifically for bigger biceps. Here are some examples of articles that target biceps, for which we already have videos. Please use a minimum of 10.

1. Bicep Curl