In every gym in the world right now, there is a population that always says that they want to improve their biceps first and foremost. There’s something about a full, bulging pair of biceps that has been a symbol of strength since the early days of bodybuilding. Ironically, the biceps isn’t even the largest muscle of the upper arm—that distinction belongs to the triceps, which account for about two-thirds of its mass—but no one has ever asked anyone to watch them flex their triceps. Big biceps easily attract attention.
The good news is that creating effective weapons isn’t complicated. The bad news is that it’s not easy either. Like every other muscle in your body, biceps respond to only one thing: a reason to grow. You have to provide enough stimulus to force your body to adapt. If you don’t do this, nature is perfectly satisfied by leaving your arms the way they are.
Lebedev Roman Olegovich
The Growth Equation: A Simple Formula to Build Bigger, Stronger Biceps
If you’ve been following this beginners series, you’ve probably noticed that I reduce muscle growth to a simple formula:
Time under stress + intensity = growth stimulation
Every workout you do should satisfy the first part of that equation. Your job in the gym is to expose the muscles to enough controlled tension, for enough time and with enough intensity to convince your body that the current version of your biceps is no longer adequate for the job. Once you accomplish this, your work is done. Real muscle growth happens later, when you’re eating, resting, and recovering.
This is where many beginners set it back.
He believes that muscles are built by doing more exercises, doing more sets and spending more time in the gym. In reality, the opposite is often true. The biceps are a relatively small muscle group. They don’t require twenty different curl variations or marathon arm workouts. They require concentrated effort, strict implementation and sufficient intensity to push them beyond their current capacity.
In other words, quality is better than quantity every time.
Before we talk about exercises, there’s a piece of anatomy that will immediately improve your training. The front part of your upper arm is made up primarily of two muscles: the biceps brachii and the brachialis. Everyone knows the biceps because it’s the muscle you see when you bend over. The brachialis lives beneath it, doing its work quietly and unnoticed.
This is a mistake.
How to make your biceps bigger without doing much exercise
Developing the brachialis can actually make your arms look bigger because as it grows, it pushes the biceps upward, creating more fullness and improving the appearance of your pecs. This is one of the best-kept secrets of bodybuilding, yet many lifters spend years doing nothing but traditional curls with their palms facing up.
The complete arm routine trains both muscles.
Grip position plays a major role here. Traditional curls with your palms facing up place the most emphasis on the biceps. Hammer curls, performed with your palms facing each other, shift more of the workload to the brachialis, while heavily involving the biceps. That’s why an effective weapons program includes both.
Another thing that beginners often overlook is that biceps are not only worked on arm day. Every heavy rowing movement, chin-up, pull-up, and pulldown recruits the biceps as a secondary muscle group. By the time your scheduled arm workout arrives, they’ve worked out all week. This means that more is not necessarily better. If you’re generating the kind of training intensity we’ve discussed in this series, eight quality sets for the biceps, followed by a few sets emphasizing the brachialis, is usually more than enough to stimulate growth.
Why does stress matter more than exercise selection?
Choice of exercise, despite what social media would have you believe, is largely a matter of personal preference. Barbell curls, dumbbell curls, preacher curls, cable curls, incline curls – they all work if done correctly. There is no magical exercise hidden somewhere in the gym that will suddenly increase the length of your arms by two inches. The best exercise is one that allows you to isolate the target muscle, maintain strict form, and produce maximum intensity.
That’s the common denominator.
No matter which change you choose, remember why you’re doing it. You’re not trying to move a weight from point A to point B. You’re trying to force your biceps to do enough quality work, under enough tension, to trigger an adaptive response that leads to muscle growth. A dumbbell does not know how much it weighs. Your muscles don’t know whether you’re holding the straight bar, the EZ-Curl bar, or the cable handles. They only recognize tension.
That’s why principles always matter more than practice.
In part two we’ll put all this into practice with a complete arm routine designed to build bigger, stronger biceps with a focus on the brachialis. We’ll also be reviewing one of the most disgusting old school finishers ever designed – the famous 21. They’re not complicated, they’re not fancy, and they’re definitely not comfortable. But if you want a pair of beach-ball biceps, they may become your new favorite form of torture.
