You want to walk around with guns a blazin’ each and every day, so that means you need to work the shit out of your arms in the gym and spurn some growth. But while your intentions may be good, there are still going to be a number of mistakes made. It is part of the game and learning from them is what will take you to the next level.
Instead of looking at these common errors as a negative, use them to give your body (and mind) a shock and a push when you correct them. Your biceps will feel differently once you are performing a particular exercise without making a mistake and that will in turn give them a better chance on being a sleeve buster.
1. FORGETTING TO SQUEEZE IT
The checklist for biceps exercises is ass-backwards sometimes. People worry about how much weight is on the bar or dumbbells and how many reps they can bang out, but rarely do they put much thought into doing a full concentration on the muscle for each and every rep.
This is what will be a game changer in your ‘pull’ muscle body parts and especially with biceps. Since you are bringing it towards you and are all the way in at the top of the rep, it is a complete waste to allow that muscle to not work as hard as it could and let it off the hook by beginning the negative portion right away. A good long and hard pause with a squeeze at the top will push the blood directly into that muscle and give you an ass-kicking pump.
2. NOT INCLUDING PREACHER-TYPE CURLS
All curls will work your biceps, but your shoulders will help when you do not use a preacher or incline bench. A movement where your armpits are tucked under a bench will take out the possibility of any other muscle being engaged and chipping in – if you use proper form, that is.
Always include at least one exercise on biceps day such as Scott curls on a preacher bench or single arm curls leaning on an incline bench. You want to totally isolate the biceps and these movements will do just that.
3. MAKE SURE TO HIT BOTH HEADS
Your biceps are made up of two heads that are located next to each other and your grip will determine which head gets hit harder. For example, a wider grip on standing barbell curls or hold your pinkie higher than your thumb on dumbbell curls will engage the inner or short head more.
The long head is located on the outside of the arm and you will be working it more with a narrow grip, thumbs higher than pinkies on an E-Z Curl bar or doing hammer curls with a parallel grip.
Make sure to choose exercises that will accentuate both the short and long head and mix them up as often as you can.
4. BEING THE KING OF SWING
If you want to bang out a few cheat reps at the end of your last set, then feel free to build up your ego by doing so. But do not use those reps as the ones you are counting as part of your working sets because all of that swinging and momentum is doing shit for your biceps.
When you swing the weights, you are minimizing your range of motion and not working the muscle you set out to train. Your lower back is getting more work than your arms when you need to swing up and get all of this forward momentum just to get the bar off the top of your thighs.
5. FLYING ELBOWS
Even the so-called ‘experts’ make this same mistake frequently and believe that they will extend their range of motion by moving the weight higher than it should. Let’s use standing barbell curls as an example: you have curled it up to your chest but instead of just squeezing it and returning it down to the starting position, you bring it up to eye level. Sounds great, right? What you are really doing is shifting the workload from your biceps to your shoulders.
Keep your elbows at your sides when doing these types of exercises (barbell or dumbbells) and you will get a lot more out of them.