by Jason Brown
Arm Day Just Got More Painful
If your favorite biceps exercises stop working, add a few of these challenging moves into your program.
Biceps not growing? Challenge them with something new. These unconventional biceps exercises build strength AND size. Here's how to do them.
1. Isometric Curl Against Pins
Do these with the pins at various heights. Curl the bar to the pins or safety supports and hold for a four-second count. Curl the barbell as hard as you can into the immovable pins.
Isometrics improve neuromuscular efficiency and the maximal force a muscle can generate. You can also use isometrics to ramp up the sympathetic nervous system before training (post-potentiation activation).
2. Close-Grip Chest-to-Bar Chin-Up
The chin-up is an effective arm-builder, but this chest-to-bar variant adds a new level of difficulty. You'll be surprised how much tougher this makes the chin-up. Adding additional weight usually isn't needed. The extra range of motion requires the biceps to contract further, relying less on the lats compared to a traditional pull-up.
3. Close-Grip Supinated Lat Pulldown
It's a staple hypertrophy exercise similar in execution to the close-grip chin-up, but with the pulldown machine, you can add more volume and illicit higher levels of metabolic stress.
4. Fat Bar Reverse Curl
Increasing the thickness of the implement you're using will kill two birds with one stone (grip strength and arm size). And there's a strong correlation between grip strength and total body strength.
An easy way to add grip work is by using a fat bar or adding Fat Gripz (Buy at Amazon) attachments to a standard bar. You'll increase the number of motor units activated by simply increasing the demand on the forearms.
5. Seated Incline Dumbbell Curl
This was a favorite of strength coach Charles Poliquin because of the massive stretch it puts on the biceps through the whole range of motion. In Charles's words: "This exercise has the advantage of shifting overload to the brachioradialis and biceps brachialis at the expense of the biceps brachii."
Not sure what that means? Just try it and you'll probably feel what he was saying.
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