To get big biceps you need a diet plan as well as a training plan. I’ll assume your eating a clean diet. Your eating quality natural foods 5- 6 meals a day, about every 3 hours, with good ratio of lean protein, carbohydrates and good fat at every meal. And you’re drinking at least half your body weight, in ounces, of water every day.
Your weight lifting routine should consist of doing your big compound lifts first. Squats and other similar compound exercises will make your body produce more growth hormone, which will stimulate muscle growth throughout your body.
I recommend using free weights over the machines, because they wiil recruit other stabilizing muscles for control, making them more functional than the machines. You will use your arms when you do your compound exercises, so they’re going to get worked even without doing isolated arm esercises.
When your doing a pulling move, such as rows or pull ups, your biceps are getting work in assisting in those exercises. If you were to do your isolated arm exercises first, then you would not perform very well doing those exercises. Use your isolated arm exercises to finish up and polish the arms after you’re finished with the compound exercises.
If you reverse the aformentioned plan, you can do a technique called, pre-exhaustion training. If you do an exercise first that tires out the supporting muslce in the arms, then the main driver of the movement, will be required to do more work, since it’s helper has been pre-exhausted. For instance: you could work your biceps or triceps before doing pull ups, rows or bench presses. The theory being that your lats would get more work due to the fact that your biceps are tapped. It looks great on paper, as to whether it really works is another question. Try it out and see what you think.
Okay, so you’ve got the main meat and potatoes exercises done and you want to move on to your arms and get big biceps. Use a lot of different angles to work your arms without overdoing it. I like to do a standing curl to hit the middle portion of the biceps; a decline curl (about 10 – 20 degrees off vertical) for my biceps to get it in the stretched position; and a concentration or spider curl to really hit the peak contraction point. By the way these are all supinated, or palms up.
I would superset the above with three position triceps exercises. For example: a standing triceps pushdown for the middle position, a triceps kick-back for the peak contraction position and an overhead triceps extension for the stretched position.
Choose what position you wish to work that day; middle , stretched or peak contraction and just do 3 to 4 supersets of that position that day. The next time you hit arms, do a different position and keep them rotating each workout. Warm up with a few sets of reverse curls.
To hit the brachialis muscle under the biceps and maintain good balance in the arms, turn your hands palms down. The brachialis is the workhorse in the upper arm for flexing the elbow. By turning your hands palms down, you eliminate the biceps and concentrate on the brachialis. If you make the muscle under the biceps bigger, it will push the biceps up and make it stand out more.
I can’t emphasize enough the importance of good nutrition, without it, you may get stronger, but, you’ll never get the lean muscularity you’re after.
Work hard, get green and eat well!
Article by:
Kurt Williams
http://www.leanphysiquesecrets.com
