To get the best out of your long head bicep routine, there are three main parameters to pay attention to:. Let us take a thorough look at each and see how each affects your long bicep workout. For any muscle, it's important to understand what the ratio of fast and slow twitch muscle fibers is.
This will help you to determine what are the best rep ranges and loads to work with. Fast twitch muscle fibers respond best to moderate to heavy loads for lower reps, as fast twitch muscle fibers are build for short, explosive bursts of energy.
Slow twitch muscle fibers respond best to moderate to lighter loads for higher reps. They are built for strength endurance. As such, it's important that you train your biceps with heavy loads. But that doesn't mean you should only be using heavy loads for lower reps. For the best possible development of your bicep, you should be training through the entire spectrum of rep ranges, which are as follows:. The load should bring your to or near failure within the given rep ranges to be effective.
By doing this, you will give your biceps the absolute best chance to grow and get stronger. Moreover, they will build muscular endurance. This will translate into improvements in other areas of your workouts as well such as on back day.
As for percentage of volume in the given rep ranges, your sets should be broken down as follows You will want to aim for around sets for the biceps per week.
If you are more advanced and your biceps are lagging, you can aim for sets per week. Note: These sets can be divided into different sessions throughout the week. Ideally, you want to hit the biceps again as soon as they've fully recovered, which generally takes days. As for how many sets within the above rep ranges, it can be broken down like this:.
The pace at which you perform a rep is regarded as tempo. It can be split into two phases, the concentric phase curling and eccentric phase uncurling.
Not many people place much care about rep tempo during bicep development. However, it has a role to play in how fast you develop your muscle. The general belief about rep tempo is that you stand a higher chance of building muscle when you vary the speed with which you lift. You should be working with slow tempos most often, and fast tempos occassionally. The eccentric phase negative is always best done with a slow tempo.
However, you can play around with explosive sets on the concentric phase. Remember, your bicep is a fast twitch muscle which responds well to explosive bursts. Overall, the more time under tension the better for hypertrophy, which means a slow tempo is good for building muscle. But it's good to play around with tempo to shock the muscle in different ways as well. Apart from muscle growth, rep tempo helps with motor control ability, body awareness, strength, power, and improved stability.
Another factor that affects muscle growth is the rest period. I would like to break the rest period into three categories:. During muscle-building exercise, there comes a time you will feel fatigued.
At this point, you tend to grab some energy by taking a rest. By making this rest about 30 seconds or less, you are subjecting your muscles to a short rest period. Although in doing this, you might not be giving yourself enough time to recuperate. This is effective in exhausting the muscle efficiently. One good thing about a long rest period is that it gives you enough time to catch your breath and have your strength almost fully restored.
Keeping your strength at the same level keeps you lifting maximum weight, resulting in some massive muscular gains. However, this has a downside. The longer the rest period you give your muscles, the harder it is to reach full exhaustion. Of course, your muscles require exhaustion overload to peak. Since both rest periods mentioned above have shortfalls, it is important to play around with rest periods.
Depending on the exercise and whether you are using heavy loads will usually determine your rest period. People wanting to grow larger biceps frequently make the same mistakes.
This mistake might be due to the structure of their biceps training plan, or it can be due to the execution of specific biceps exercises. If you want to amass a well-formed bicep with a towering peak, avoid the following mistakes. At the gym, we all want to display our strength. People routinely grab extremely big weight off the rack or use dumbbells that are excessively heavy for the activity they're performing, partly to show off and partly to obtain monstrous gains.
While using heavy loads is good for the bicep, it is not if you can't perform the exercise correctly. Range of motion and correct form always trumps weight load. The point is, you should only lift what you can do with a full range of motion and good form. It's important to build a strong mind muscle connection. If you are not focusing on the muscle at hand, you will not see the results you want.
Rather than spending all of your energy tossing weights around, taking the effort to learn what exercises work and what parts of those exercises are most successful can help you make the most of your gym time. Think about the contraction and lengthening of the muscle with each rep. We have previously highlighted the human body's adaptability. If you do not vary your training regimen, your body will get accustomed, and the hypertrophy-inducing muscle damage will be reduced.
For the same reason, it is critical to practice a variety of workouts throughout the week. Performing a well-thought-out long head bicep workout will help you to build a bigger bicep peak because it's the long head that's visible when the biceps are viewed in a flex position from behind. While you can't isolate a specific part of the biceps, you can certainly emphasize different regions by deploying an intelligent exercise selection in your workout.
Incline curls, and other such exercises that have you curl with your arms behind your torso, will shift the emphasis onto the outer muscles fibers of your biceps and thus help to create a taller peak. Curling with a close-grip has a similar effect, providing that you don't let the bar drift too far in front of your body, in which case the short inner head will actually take over the movement.
Make sure that you give these exercises enough time to display their effects. Muscle growth, as you probably know by now, doesn't happen overnight or even in a week.
Stick with a good bicep peak workout for weeks, and then you might just see your biceps start to change shape and become taller. You could have the best bicep peak genetics that the world has ever seen. But if your biceps lack that critical foundation of mass , then your top-tier genetics aren't going to help you. Gaining mass requires you to consume a high-protein, calorie-surplus diet while getting adequate recovery and performing enough training volume reps x sets x weight that's taken close enough to failure to stimulate hypertrophy.
We covered the workout part of the equation in this article, but the devil is in the detail. Make sure that you're resting enough time minutes ideally between sets so that your strength doesn't drop off too dramatically.
Yet, you also need to train close enough to failure so that you're recruiting the maximum amount of muscle fibers over the course of your workout. In practice, this means that you shouldn't leave more than reps in the tank on your sets. If you've got layers of fat covering your arms, then it doesn't matter how good your bicep peaks are because nobody's going to be able to see them.
So you can see our guide on how to get defined biceps if you want to get more cuts and striations in your upper arms to make your biceps more peaked. Specifically, you need to eat in a calorie deficit by expending more energy than you take in. But you also need to ensure that you have sufficient size under that fat so that the peaks actually look impressive when you do reveal them.
If you're a bodybuilder or competitive physique athlete, then posing is of paramount importance. In fact, good posing, as we mentioned earlier, could mean the difference between winning your show and finishing in 5th place.
So if you actually want people to see your bicep peaks, then you need to know how to flex your arms properly. The traditional bicep peak flex involves moving the undersides of your forearms toward your biceps and then squeezing the biceps themselves so that they "pop" up even more.
You want your arm to be straight while you hit this pose. Otherwise, the judges won't be able to see your peak. You can improve your competency at this pose by holding the contraction for a few seconds on some of your bicep peak exercises.
After all, posing is an isometric activity, so if you want to excel at it, then you need to get used to contracting your biceps for more than a second at a time. So when you hold the peak contraction during a curl, you can essentially think of it as weighted posing.
And if you can get good at weighted posing, then just imagine how easy regular posing will feel! See also : Lower bicep workout. Overall, the best exercise for bicep peak development is, for most lifters, probably incline curls because they emphasize the long head which is responsible for the peak while also building that overall arm mass that every pair of biceps needs. Of course, if you already have well-developed biceps but still lack that coveted peak, then reverse curls may actually be your best bet.
This is because they train the brachialis, which, when well developed, actually pushes the biceps out because the brachialis lies beneath the biceps and makes them look more peaked. We tried over movements to find the best exercise for bicep peak development. Here are the results Written By James Jackson. Fact checked by David Tran BSc. Table of Contents show. Another exercise for targeting the long head of the biceps is the drag curl. Drag curls can be done with both barbells and dumbbells however will work best with barbells.
To do a drag curl, hold the weight and slowly raise it to your chest dragging the barbell, or dumbbell, along your body instead of curling it in front of you. Your shoulder will naturally rotate back and your elbows will bend out and back if you keep the weight an equal distance from your body.
It is important for this exercises to keep your body from moving so as not to assist the long head from moving the weight. For further depiction of the drag curl, this video demonstrates the movement also. Drag curls are regarded by some to be the single best exercise for biceps and are certified to improve the biceps peak if they are done with enough volume and correct form.
Both the concentric and eccentric phases of drag curls are important so use a weight which can be controlled on the way down. The short head of the biceps is relevant for thickness and width and the long head of the biceps is more relevant for the bicep peak.
The short head is best hit by preacher curls, Arnold curls, and any curling exercise where the shoulder is in flexion. The long head of the bicep is stimulated most productively from seated incline dumbbell curls and drag curls. Adding a second movement from a slightly different angle and with a slightly different relative intensity is the best way to work the short head for better overall gains.
Since preacher curls focus on the short head of the biceps more than the long head, they're obviously a good choice to include in your workout. But preachers can be done any number of ways: the one-arm dumbbell version, the EZ-bar version, or curling off the steep side of the bench sometimes called a Scott curl, with a barbell, EZ-bar, or dumbbell.
Doing your preacher curls standing rather than seated can even allow you to use just a bit more momentum, allowing you to do a few cheat reps as well. Standing upper cable curls are another short-head movement.
You can alternately try them one arm at a time, or even slightly change the angle of pull coming from the sides by positioning the pulleys higher—or slightly lower—than you normally would. You can find more short-head exercises in the Bodybuilding.
When you find a movement you like, stick with it for weeks, at which point it might be a good idea to change things up again as progress starts to stall and a new stimulus is required for continued adaptation. Choosing the right variations of exercises with the right loads is a good start, but you still have to do the work.
When it comes to initiating growth processes at the cellular level, you won't get away with stopping your sets short of muscle failure.
In fact, taking sets of each exercise past failure is superior for building maximal muscle. Hence, combining the move with an intensity-boosting training technique can elicit greater overall growth.
The best exercises work even better when you know how to use them. Our guide 10 Best Biceps Workout Exercises for Building Muscle goes in-depth on the moves you need to be doing, complete with 3 workouts to put them into action!
Bill Geiger, MA, has served as a senior content editor for Bodybuilding. View all articles by this author. But what if you want to focus on the short head of the biceps? That's trickier.
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