Contributing blogger Troy Meyers is a certified personal trainer and sports conditioner with more than 10 years of experience. He owns Atlanta-based JockBoyLocker.com and contributes to the site’s Lockerroom Blog.
Spend a few minutes inside a gym and it’s clear that gay men like working, touching and flexing their biceps. The ones who don’t just haven’t made theirs large enough to warrant a little worship.
To build bigger biceps requires variety. Developing optimum size and strength of the bicep muscle group requires a mix of barbell, dumbbell and cable exercises to work the various parts of the muscle.
Keep these tips in mind when crafting a bigger biceps program:
Straight barbells keep the arm neutral. Curling bars keep the arm slightly pronated. Dumbbells and cables allow for separation.
The preacher curl emphasizes the first part of elbow flexion.
The barbell curl stresses the midrange of biceps flexion.
The concentration curl stresses the last range of biceps flexion.
Variation of those three ranges is essential to optimize muscle fiber stress. That increases biceps size, strength and function through a full range of motion.
In any biceps curl, it’s important to fully extend the arm before starting the next repetition. The pre-stretched position of the biceps stresses the muscle through its full range of motion. Use caution to make this a controlled, gentle stretch and avoid damage to the muscle from uncontrolled hyperextension.
Keeping your elbows in front of the body — typical of barbell and dumbbell curls — stresses the brachialis and short head of the biceps and reduces stress on the long head of the biceps.
The long head is stressed more when the arm is behind the body — think incline dumbbell curl — which is an excellent exercise to increase both its size and strength.
Now get to work on building those bulging biceps.
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