Have you been training your biceps for ages without seeing any growth or any increase in the amount of weight lifted? If so, there are countless others like you. You have reached a plateau and it’s time to breach this wall. Try this plateau-busting workout for a while to spurt your biceps into growth.
Forget the past
If your biceps workout in the past has revolved around the barbell curl for mass and concentration curl for definition along with a few other dumbbell exercises thrown in, now is the time to drastically change direction. We’ll try two approaches at the same time: work one arm at a time to give each your total attention each time and also work both arms during another exercise to give each little time to rest. What you want is to shock them into growth, to make them do work like they’ve never have.
Giant sets
We’ll be doing a giant set throughout.
What is a giant set and why this?
The giant set is simply several exercises performed back to back without rest. Usually they are used when exercising different muscle group so that while one group is working, the other muscle group is resting for the next round.
Why the giant set here if it’s meant for different muscle groups?
We use the giant set because we want to ramp up the intensity of the biceps workout, to shock it into new growth.
The exercises
Here we go with the order of exercises.
Start with the seated dumbbell curls. Do one set. Being seated means you can adopt strict form.
Move on to preacher curls using the EZ bar and then a machine curl. Preacher curls are really good at making the biceps peak and this is how you can really increase the apparent size of your arms. You need to finish with a machine exercise because your arms will be pretty much exhausted at the end. Use whatever is available in your gym or else do the concentration curl, remembering to really concentrate on working the muscle when doing this exercise.
So is that all there is to it?
The bicep is a small muscle group – you want to work it thoroughly but not to kill it with too many exercises. So 3 exercises in a giant set ought to be enough as long as you do them well and thoroughly.
Technique
Go through one set of each exercise quickly for warm-up. You’ve just done 3 warm-up sets at the end. Then do 2 more rounds with the last one being till exhaustion. This is where the pain and suffering, I mean, the fun begins. With your biceps already tired after a heavy set of seated dumbbell curls, move on to the preacher curl; you may allow your body to move somewhat more to help you. In the machine exercise, just close your eyes and go through the pain barrier until your arms become numb. After your first set to exhaustion, add 2 more sets for each exercise to exhaustion, if you can. If not, do a giant set to exhaustion and try to increase it to 2 or 3 giant sets in future training sessions as your biceps toughen up. Because you will be very tired throughout these additional sets, you will have in fact to decrease the weight. This is good.
That’s it. You will have done a warm-up set, 2 sets with the second to exhaustion and 2 more sets past exhaustion, squeezing every single fibre of muscle in your biceps to jump-start growth. Remember, the workout starts in the mind. Focus on each and every rep like it is your last.