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There is no muscle group that stands out as much as the biceps. These muscles represent strength and look very impressive when wearing a t-shirt in the summer. When you ask someone how strong they are, they will quickly show their biceps, and in the world outside of bodybuilding, the biceps are often considered more impressive than a wide back or big legs.
Above, we immediately describe why this small muscle group is often trained too much. After all, you don’t show off your calves when you want to show that you do strength training. In this article, we will delve deeper into how you can develop large biceps using the barbell curl, the compound exercise for your biceps.
Basic Exercise for Big Biceps: the Barbell Curl
Many people are familiar with the barbell curl, which is often performed from a standing position. It is one of the simplest exercises to train the biceps because you grab a barbell or an EZ bar and bring the weight lying on it from bottom to top to your shoulders. You repeat this for the desired number of repetitions. Simple, right?
Unfortunately, in practice, it’s not that simple. The catch when performing the barbell curl lies in the fact that this seems like a fairly simple exercise, but in reality, like all other exercises, it deserves the necessary attention. So, from now on, no more throwing around the weight, using your lower back, or performing the exercise with too many repetitions. Below, we explain further how to perform this exercise correctly and effectively, resulting in large biceps.
Full Range of Motion
The barbell curl is often performed too quickly without a clear focus on contraction. It’s important to move the biceps from full extension to full contraction during the exercise. Make sure your wrists stay straight, as it’s not a wrist curl, and also ensure that your upper arms are kept close to your body. If you let your elbows move along, the biceps work less hard, and the effectiveness of the exercise is reduced.
One thing you can do to exclude your elbows from this exercise is to take the barbell in your hands and rotate your shoulders slightly backward. When you do this and move your shoulder blades together, it’s almost impossible for your elbows to join in the exercise, forcing the biceps to do the heavy lifting.
Squeezing with the Biceps
In addition to pushing your shoulders together to exclude your elbows from the exercise, you can also shift the focus more on the biceps during the exercise. During the concentric phase of the exercise, when the weight needs to be brought up, hold the biceps for a moment by putting some extra tension on them. Squeeze with your biceps, and you’ll notice that your biceps will grow even faster. If you don’t do this and let your biceps rest at the top, the tension on the muscle is released, which is not beneficial for their development.
Furthermore, it’s important that your elbows are not pulled into the movement, so don’t move them forward. If you do this, and you have lifted the weight all the way up, your biceps will rest on your elbows, and the muscles will no longer be under tension.
EZ-Bar if Your Wrist Hurts
A common complaint when performing the barbell curl is that athletes experience wrist pain while training with the straight bar. If you encounter this problem, you can replace the straight barbell with the EZ curl bar. Because this EZ Bar has a curved shape, there is less tension on your forearms and wrists than when performing the exercise with the straight bar. As a result, the complaints often decrease, and the EZ Bar Curls can be trained in the same way.
No Cheating
It has been said, but the barbell curl, with the straight bar or with the EZ bar, is a much underestimated exercise, which is very often incorrectly performed. One of the most common mistakes is that athletes start cheating by not fully straightening their arms. Make sure not to move your elbows backward; they should remain still throughout the exercise, and you should stretch your arms, yes, the biceps.
Not only do people cheat using their elbows, but the lower back is also often used when performing this exercise. In the concentric phase of the exercise, the lower back is often used to give the final push. If you do this, it means you are dealing with very heavy reps, and a spotter wouldn’t be a bad idea to guide you through the concentric part. You should be able to perform the negative part yourself. This way, you fully use your biceps and not your lower back. Using the lower back with the barbell curl can also lead to very unpleasant lower back injuries.
Variations of the Barbell Curl
Despite its simplicity, the barbell curl has a number of variations. When varying with this exercise, you actually only change the position of your hands, giving the exercise a different name: spider curls
or preacher curls.
When performing the barbell curl, place your hands shoulder-width apart, but you can also vary in this. When you take your arms just slightly wider than your shoulders, you focus more on the inside of the biceps. When you do the opposite and place your hands further inward, you focus on the outside of the biceps again. Don’t overdo it and make sure you stay just inside shoulder width or just outside shoulder width with your hands.
Vary with Other Biceps Exercises
In the above argument, we have clearly been able to show that the barbell curl is the best compound exercise for training the biceps. The nickname of this exercise is therefore also the ‘mother of all biceps exercises.’ However, for the development of the biceps alone, it is not enough to train the biceps with this exercise alone.
Train your biceps also with incline curls and alternate dumbbell curls. These provide the necessary variation and help your biceps grow. Additionally, you involve the biceps a lot when training the back muscles. It is therefore advisable to train the biceps after training the back muscles.
