How to Get Bigger Biceps (7 Simple Tips)

Regardless of your genetics or starting point, it's always possible to have bigger, more defined biceps. In this article, we'll look at 7 simple and advanced tips to get there as quickly as possible.

Back exercises, such as pulldowns and rows, involve multiple joints and muscle groups, including the biceps. These movements not only train the biceps as part of a larger effort, but also increase overall strength in secondary muscles that directly and indirectly engage the biceps, which in turn can improve performance in isolation exercises.

Basically, the stronger you are at back exercises, the more weight you can use on the barbell curl when training your biceps. Consequently, you'll be able to train heavier and stimulate more muscle growth.

When you do biceps training at least twice a week, you provide more opportunities to create microtears in the muscle fibers, which are essential for muscle growth.

Each training session initiates the process of muscle repair and growth, known as hypertrophy. By training your biceps twice a week, you double these opportunities, leading to a potential increase in protein synthesis and muscle growth over time.

Another important aspect is recovery. By splitting your training into two weekly sessions, you can better manage fatigue and muscle recovery. This means that instead of performing a single workout with more exercises, which can lead to a longer recovery period and the risk of overtraining, you spread the workload throughout the week.

This not only helps maintain high quality in each training session but also reduces the risk of injury. Additionally, training your biceps twice a week can increase training efficiency by allowing you to focus on different aspects of the muscle on different days, such as focusing on strength one day and volume or technique the next.

Training your biceps to a full stretch is extremely helpful on the road to bigger biceps because it maximizes tension throughout the muscle. When you fully stretch your biceps during the exercise, you're working the muscle fiber along its entire length, which is crucial for stimulating full-body muscle growth.

This is due to the principle of mechanical tension, one of the main factors contributing to muscle hypertrophy. Stretching the muscle fully during an exercise, such as the barbell curl or incline curl, ensures that all parts of the biceps are activated and challenged under load, which can lead to a more significant increase in muscle size and strength in the long term.

Additionally, training your biceps to full length helps improve flexibility and joint health, which can reduce the risk of injury. A muscle that is frequently worked through its full range of motion tends to be more flexible and less susceptible to training-related injuries.

It may sound like something bordering on mysticism, but science proves it: by actively focusing on the muscle being worked, you increase muscle activation.

When it comes to biceps, the more you focus on using your biceps during exercises, the more the muscle you want to target will be activated and the less the surrounding muscles will be able to steal the movement. This means more muscle fibers in the biceps are recruited with each repetition, which can lead to more muscle growth.

In short, by improving awareness and control over your biceps (through enhancing the mind-muscle connection), you can perform exercises with more precise technique, avoiding using other muscles to compensate, which is crucial for targeted muscle growth.

Avoiding redundant exercises is crucial to having big biceps. When you perform too many exercises that target the same muscle group in the same way, you run the risk of doing irrelevant work that won't help muscle growth.

For example, doing barbell curls and scott curls in the same workout works the biceps in virtually the same way, and the second exercise (the redundant one) may be performed with the muscle already fatigued and will not be properly recruited. Thus, it can be considered irrelevant work (useless volume).

Additionally, when you use redundant exercises, you are giving up space in your workout that could be used to do other (non-redundant) exercises or techniques.

When you change the number of repetitions, you're essentially changing the intensity and type of stress your muscles experience. This is very useful in biceps training, to avoid plateauing and periodize training.

For example, fewer reps with heavier weights focus on strength and building fast-twitch muscle fibers, while more reps with lighter weights tend to improve muscular endurance and increase blood flow to the muscles.

This variation helps create a more conducive environment for muscle growth by challenging muscles in different ways, promoting adaptations in both size and strength.

Focusing on the eccentric phase of the movement during biceps exercises is vital to having bigger biceps, especially since most people skip this phase of the repetition in favor of using heavier loads.

This phase, also known as the negative phase, occurs when you are lengthening the muscle under tension (resisting the load), such as lowering the bar during a barbell curl.

Studies show that the eccentric phase is more effective for muscle hypertrophy than the positive phase (the ascent), as the negative phase has a greater potential to create microtears. These microtears, as mentioned elsewhere, are essential for muscle repair and growth.

The following workout is an example (just that) of a routine that puts into practice the tips we saw in the text.