Think carefully about your biceps workouts. Do you tend to perform the same exercises over and over at every session—barbell curls, preacher curls, seated dumbbell curls, and so on? Now go ahead and flex your biceps. Are you satisfied with their current size and shape? If the answer is yes (which I doubt), then go ahead and flip to the next article. However, if your answer is no, then please keep reading, because it is my goal to greatly increase ticket sales to your “gun show”.
Personally, I am a huge advocate of variety when it comes to designing individual training programs. If my 28 years of experience as a competitive bodybuilder and coach have taught me anything, it is that the human body is a profoundly adaptable machine—and because of this, we must continually present new challenges by switching up the stimuli we thrust upon it (that is, exercises, angles, tempos, and techniques).
While there are many effective ways to tweak your workouts with the goal of pushing past plateaus or staving off stagnation, the one we shall focus on in this article is introducing a few novel movements. Of course, each of the exercises I will present are nothing more than variations of the basic curl. By simply changing the arc of pull, the angle of the torso, and the positioning of the elbows and shoulders, you can attack a unique set of motor unit pools (and muscle fibers). This, along with giving the central nervous system something new to deal with, can help take your biceps development—and arm measurements—to an entirely new level.
