The Best Bicep Workouts for Size, Shape, and Strength

Image source.

When it comes to building impressive arms, nothing catches the eye like well-developed biceps. But training them properly takes more than just curling a dumbbell up and down. To fully develop your biceps, you need to understand their anatomy, how they function, and how to stimulate them through a variety of angles and movements. Let’s break down what makes the best bicep workouts—and how to do each one for maximum results.

The 3 Key Muscles

Your biceps are made up of two heads. The long head runs along the outside of the upper arm. This head gives your biceps their “peak” when flexed. The short head lies on the inner part of your upper arm, contributing to arm width and thickness. Then there is the brachialis. While it’s not technically part of the biceps, it sits beneath the biceps and pushes them up when it grows. Training your brachialis is in alignment with training your two bicep heads, it strengthens forearm and elbow flexion, and can further assist in giving your bicep a nice peak and powerful-looking arm.

Flexion and supination are the main two movements your biceps aid you in performing. Shoulder and elbow flexion allow you to raise your arm in the front of your body and bend and flex your elbow and forearm respectively. Supination is the movement of inverting your hands or turning your hands towards your face. A common phrase to consider is “pinkies up.” When you grab a barbell or dumbbell and position it for a curl your palms face you, that supination. Pinkies up refers to engaging the full range of supination motion when doing a curl workout and strengthening that movement.

One of the things to note when training your biceps is stretching the muscle under load. When your arms are behind your torso, such as during incline dumbbell curls or Bayesian cable curls, your biceps are elongated. This eccentric stretch causes more mechanical tension, which helps better grow the muscle.