Great Biceps Workouts

For people who are into weight training, the biceps are an important and popular muscle to exercise. They're also a relatively small muscle that assists on weight training exercises for other upper body muscles, especially for the upper back, so you'll want to be careful not to overtrain them.

Bicep workouts are best performed after your upper back workout as part of a push pull split routine. Since the biceps help out a bit on most upper back exercises such as pull-ups and rows, they'll be warmed up when it's time to train them. You'll also avoid having sore biceps when you do your back workouts if you do them during the same workout. You need your assisting muscle groups fresh when you train the larger ones.

Every major biceps exercise involves curling a weight upward. Barbell and dumbbell curls are the main exercises for building the biceps. You can start your biceps workout with a few sets of barbell curls before going to the dumbbells. With dumbbells you'll be able to do many various curling exercises - standing, seated on an incline bench, on a preacher bench.

Hammer curls are another excellent exercise to do for the brachialis during a great bicep workout. The brachialis is a small muscle on the outsides of the upper arms between the biceps and triceps. Train them with a few sets of hammer curls to give your arms a thicker look.

To finish off your biceps workout, you could do some cable curls. Doing a couple of sets of cable biceps curls for high reps will enable you to end your workout with a nice pump in the arms.

Biceps exercises are some of easiest to cheat on. If you use weight that's too heavy you'll end up using some body english to get the weight up and you won't be training your biceps as efficiently. You'll want to do sets with good form so you focus the resistence on your biceps However, some cheating isn't always a bad thing when you're doing biceps workouts, as it can help you get some extra reps. You just have to be sure to get enough reps with good form first.

The most common way to cheat on exercises during your biceps workouts is to bend forward to get a curl started upward and straighten your body as the weight is coming up. It's not too big of a deal to do this to finish off a set as long as you aren't going so heavy that you may hurt your lower back. You can even do whole sets of heavy cheat curls if you're careful and you lower the weight slowly to take advantage of the negative.

To prevent from swaying your body when you're trying for proper biceps exercise form you can do standing curls with your back against a wall. If you feel your upper body drifting forward you'll know that you're using too much weight for proper lifting form.

Another common way to break form on biceps exercises is to shrug your shoulders while you're curling. This is surprisingly easy to do. As you curl a barbell or dumbbell up, you may unconsciously shrug up your shoulders a bit to help get the weight up. When you're trying to get reps with good form during a biceps workout, you need to pay close attention to avoid doing this.

Some weight trainers will curl their wrists towards them at the top of a biceps curl rep. This isn't necessarily cheating as it won't help you lift more weight, but you'll want to avoid doing it because the resistence won't be focused on the biceps as much. Keep your wrists straight when you do biceps exercises.

You'll know you used proper form and got a great biceps workout if you feel soreness the next day. Overdoing cheating techniques on biceps exercises won't work the muscles as efficiently and you may not even feel like you trained them the next day.