How to do biceps exercises correctly?

Biceps curls are probably the easiest exercises to cheat. Whenever your arms are not resting on a bench (as during a preacher or machine curl), all it takes is a little swing to shift some tension from your arms to your front delts and make a hard rep easier. Cheating is a valuable tool for pushing sets beyond strict, full-rep failure, but if you do so before then, it’s unlikely you will ever thoroughly stress your bi’s. In an effort to hump up heavier weights than they could otherwise use, many bodybuilders start cheating on curls from rep number one and increase their swinging as the set wears on.

The popularity of biceps doesn’t make them any larger in relation to their peers. Compared with your lats and quadriceps, your bi’s are puny, so if you’re pumping out as many sets in your biceps workout as your back workout, you’re likely piling on the “little guys.” More than any other muscles, biceps are frequent victims of overtraining, which halts or even reverses their gains.

More pabulum has been published about arm training than any other bodypart. For example, not long ago it was preached as gospel that to accentuate your lower biceps, “thou shalt do preacher curls” and to accentuate your biceps peaks, “thou shalt do concentration curls.” Neither “tenet” is true, so it’s no wonder that so many bodybuilders fire off curls but miss their intended targets. In fact, you can’t put any greater emphasis on your lower biceps than the rest of the muscle, and merely focusing on peak contractions won’t raise your peaks.

Although the biceps are simple, two-headed muscles targeted almost exclusively via curls, you still need to perform various types of curls to properly tax the manifold fibers. Too many bodybuilders get in a lazy pattern of doing, for example, all standing, bilateral, free-weight curls.

The contraction is the crucial component of a curl, so it’s unfortunate that so many bodybuilders never truly flex their bi’s against resistance. Generally, this is because they use too much weight and perform their reps quickly and with excessive momentum.