12/10/2015
BICEPS TIPS...
TRAIN YOUR BICEPS AFTER A REST DAY
What's the best way to ensure you have a great workout? By making sure you're well-rested beforehand, have plenty of fuel in your tank, and are mentally fresh to push yourself. More often than not, that's after a day away from the gym—at least one in which you took the day to actually recover instead of spending the wee hours in some club.
If your biceps are your top priority, do them first after a rest day. Because it's a short workout—usually 30 minutes, tops—it isn't too difficult to maintain high-octane intensity over the course of your workout. And if you train biceps with triceps, consider even hitting your biceps first since they're your main target.
Rest also means giving your arm flexors at least 48 hours between workouts. Follow a training split in which you space your back workout either two days before or two days after your arm day. Working your biceps on Mondays and back on Tuesdays provides inadequate recovery time and can hinder overall arm gains. Whatever split you follow, just use rest days judiciously and be cautious when planning your back attack.
TRAIN YOUR BICEPS TWICE OVER THE COURSE OF YOUR SPLIT
While you don't want to train your biceps on consecutive days, there's no reason you can't do them twice over the course of your training split. This strategy works especially well if you follow a longer split, say 5-6 days.
Given that the biceps are a relatively small muscle group that recovers faster than larger body parts like legs or back, you can train them more frequently, at least in the short-term. Every third or fourth day works fine, so long as you don't train them immediately before or after a back day.
When following this approach, consider using biceps workouts that are very different from each other, rather than repeating the same workout on both days. In this case, you might make one session a general mass-building workout that includes exercises for both the long and short heads, as well as the brachialis, and focus the other workout specifically on the long head with a variety of moves, grips, and rep ranges.
You can even change up the advanced techniques you use, using forced reps during one workout and negatives in the other. The idea here is to work the biceps in very different ways for optimal results.
DO BICEPS AFTER A BACK WORKOUT
If you're following a shorter training split or trying to get in two biceps workouts per week, it might make sense to train them after back. Since both are pulling muscles—the biceps are engaged during most multijoint back movements—it makes sense to do them together. You don't, however, want to train you biceps before your back.
The biceps get a good workout already in back training, so most people reason that they might as well finish them off. What you want to avoid is training biceps the day before or after back so that you're not working this muscle group on consecutive days, as stated above. Even a smaller body part like the biceps requires a minimum of two days' rest between workouts.
"THE BICEPS GET A GOOD WORKOUT ALREADY IN BACK TRAINING, SO MOST PEOPLE REASON THAT THEY MIGHT AS WELL FINISH THEM OFF."
CHOOSE A SUPERIOR MASS-BUILDER AND USE CHALLENGING WEIGHTS
There's no shabbier way to start your workout than with the wrong choice of exercises. What makes a given exercise right or wrong? The amount of weight you can lift. Multijoint exercises are the clear winner when it comes to larger muscle groups, but with biceps, you're left with a battery of single-joint movements.
So let's go back to the original question: What exercise can you move the most weight with? Let me give you two sample choices here: concentration curl or standing barbell curl. This should be easy to pick—standing barbell curl is the clear winner—but many guys still start their arm workouts with light exercises. It's like putting reverse-grip press-downs early in your triceps routine, or doing leg extensions first on leg day.
