SuperFitness

Bicep Boners

Training your biceps is hard work. There are many good exercises you can use to add mass, shape and sculpt precisely what you want. The double-headed nature of the muscle and the two multi-rotational joints of the arm make it very easy to work hard and achieve nothing. Mistakes are easy to make: here are the seven that occur from time-to- time.

1. When progress is no longer being made, many weight trainers try to regain the force by adding more exercises, sets, and/or reps. The first thing to try is reducing the load. Many roadblocks are the result of training levels your body no longer needs for mass development. You may be overtraining. Try cutting back before you start adding more.

2. Selecting too high a weight can cause a number of problems. It is hard to keep your form throughout the reps if the weight is too much. Select a weight that allows you to consistently hit within the target range without having to use other muscles to assist. Normally this is from seventy to eighty percent of your one rep maximum lift, but don't take the rule as an absolute. If in doubt, try a lighter weight. This lighter weight is wrong only if you consistently exceed the recommended rep range.

3. For most weight trainers special enhancement techniques like cheat reps, forced reps, supersets, staggered sets, and pre-exhaustion are not necessary to get impressive growth.

4. When you find that growth has stopped, check your form first. If you are sure it is correct, ask a training partner you trust to look over your form during a training session. Failure to follow the best form usually takes the stress of the exercise off the muscle you want to work; and with small muscles like the biceps this can be a critical mistake.

5. Use a split routine that keeps all the exercises together that use the various arm muscles. Many chest exercises place heavy use on the triceps as helper muscles. For the biceps, you will find that many back exercises require the use of the biceps. Training the biceps one day, and the back the next can overtrain the biceps by not allowing enough recovery time.

6. Don't think of using an up-the-rack weight progression because it 'warms up the muscle'. You should always warm up with a few light reps, low weight sets to get the muscles warm. A routine pattern of increasing the weight from set to set risks injury. If you want to try a new level of intensity, try reducing the weight ten percent between each set, cut the rest time between sets to a minimum, and keep the reps count constant or increasing.

7. Stagnate routines produce stagnate results. While it is true that you should set a program and stay with it for a while, growth sometimes is the result of a shock to the muscle. Try varying the order of the exercises, changing rest between sets, or varying the set count moderately to give the biceps a little extra encouragement. Surprise the muscles involved by doing it only once in every three to five cycles.

If you have been making any of the mistakes shown here, that's good. Once you have made the mistake and found out that it does not help, you can start making progress. Maintaining super fitness, after all, is hard work.

Contributed by C. W. Mann, who also writes the syndicated column, SuperFitness.

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