Picture your arms, specifically your biceps busting the short sleeve of an extra large t shirt as you give a double back biceps pose. Chances are if you're reading this article, you may not have the massive biceps and peaked yt with some time, dedication, and lots of effort and training you can beef up tose flat bis to impress Jane from next door and turn heads at the beach 
Bicep training seems to be a lost art one by since the days of Larry Scott and Vince Gironda. Walk into the gym and rarely will you see a guy with biceps that stand out. Most guys who train the "mirror" muscles will do dozens of high repetition sets of concentration curls, barbell curls, dumbbell curls, you name it. Endless sets and reps of curls and they still don't have biceps that make you jealous.
Doing curls alone just isn't going to cut it. If only curls worked by itself, we'd all be sporting 20 inches pythons. There are 4 sure-fire tactics to help you build bigger biceps. Use them in your bodybuilding program and you'll guarantee yourself results. Biceps can be a very stubborn muscle group if you don't know how to train it and make it grow the right way.
Eat More
Eating big to get big still holds true, true for any body part of muscle group. The body likes to grow proportionately with weight gain. Rarely will you see a 225 lbs plus at 10% bf or under with small biceps. From thousands of empirical case studies and evidence and bodybuilding observations, it's estimated that for every 10 lbs of muscle you gain, you will gain a 3/4 to an inch on your arms. And since about 2/3 of your arm is triceps, that translates into a 1/3 to 1/4 inch on your biceps for every 10 lbs of muscle gain.
You can't grow bigger muscles if you're not gaining muscle weight. And to gain muscle weight you'll have to eat a lot. And you want to gain weight if you're not eating enough for that calories surplus.
Get Stronger
What makes your muscles grow in the first place? What is the stimulus or drives of growth for any muscles of the body? Microtrauma, and to create microtrauma you have to lift weights. The connection between muscle growth and light weight boils down to how much microtrauma you can create in a given workout. The stronger you are, the heavier the weights you can handle, and the more microtrauma you create for muscle growth.
Now, in science speak, this process isn't exact. Take a look at the real world. How many guyys you see who can bench 400 plus pounds and have small arms and chest? On the contrary, have you seen a 130 lbs. kidwith hardly any muscle deadlift or squat 500 plus pounds?
Greater strength, more muscle built. You have to have the strength foundation to build more muscle. More muscle results in greater strength gains. Greater strength gains results in more muscle built. One condition would not exist without the other. Even pure neural training with powerlifting techniques and programs have their limit.
So the bottom line is that if you want big biceps muscles, you have to get stronger. If you can strap 2 45 lbs plates to your waist and do 10 reps of chinups or pullups on multiple sets, do you think you will still have small biceps?
Focus on Back Exercises
This goes back to getting stronger with chinups, pullups, and deadlifts. In all back lifts, your biceps come heavily into play. Take the barbell row for example. When you pull the bar up to your stomach, you recruit your biceps, especially if you're using an underhand grip. Any movement that involves you to pull your body or a weight resistance up recuits the bicep muscles, like chinups, pullups, deadlifts.
Work up to using heavy weights with these compound back movements and your biceps will grow,
Here are some of the best pulling exercises,
barbell and dumbbell rows, both overhand and underhand grip
chinups and pullups, do them weighted, on rings and on ropes
upright rows,
deadlift
Exercise variations, include curls
Putting it together
So now you know that you have to get stronger and use compound back lifts that involves both the back and biceps in a pulling motion, you need to know how to put together a bicep routine with that basic framework. Here are the rules,
Put focus on barbell or dumbbell rows, chose 1 main movement, 4 sets of 5-8 reps, then pick 2 supplementary exercises like barbell and db curls, 2-3 sets of 10-12,
if setting a body part split routine, work the back and biceps together on its own day.
focus on weight progression (link) and give example,
this covers all bases of strength foundation and rest pause (link to shock article) and post fatigue, give examples of both, use shock techniques only once a week,
use exercise variations to rotate different exercise when you hit a plateau
Eventually your back and biceps will get bigger and stronger. Your work capacity will increase. This means that you can work biceps more often for even more growth. The results are compounded.
Related posts:
- Build Bigger Chest Muscles Building a bigger chest seems to be a problem for a lot of people who have much stronger triceps or shoulders. Often the tris and shoulders overpower the chest muscles in compound pushing lifts like bench press and dumbbell press. If you’re tricep dominant, those muscles will tire out first before your chest muscles are [...]...
- Build Bigger Leg Muscles More than half of all lifters and gym-goers never train or work their legs in the gym. If your primary goal is to build massive amounts of muscle, then you have got to train your legs, specifically your entire lower body. This includes abs, lower back, quads/thighs, hamstrings, and calves. The single squat movement works [...]...
- How to Build Bigger Triceps Muscles For most people, triceps often respond best with moderate to high rep ranges (bodybuilding rep range) with 8-12 reps using heavy weights. Beginners and intermediate lifters don’t necessarily need extra tricep workouts in their routine because the triceps are heavily worked with chest and shoulder movements. Think bench presses, dumbbell presses, military shoulder press, and [...]...
- How to Build Bigger Back Muscles If you want to build bigger back muscles, then the best number one exercise you can do is the deadlift. Deadlifts rules. The basic deadlift has many variations (one arm, dimel, side to side, trap bar, over/undergrip) to boost your muscle building progress for the entire back. photo credit: Cronfeld Deadlifts should be the focus of your [...]...
- How to Build Bigger Shoulder Muscles The shoulders, made up of 3 heads — anterior (front), lateral (side), and posterior (rear), are often hit and targeted with the major upper body compound chest movements like the barbell and dumbbell bench press. The shoulders are also often overtrained when they stop growing. If you’re training the chest directly 2 or 3 times [...]...
- How to Build Bigger Leg Muscles Building up your leg muscles requires some serious heavy weights involving squats and supplementary exercises. Squats are king when it comes to building leg muscles. I’m going to show you a basic but very effective routine for beefing up your legs. photo credit: kitAy But first, understand that building muscle requires one to use progressively heavier and [...]...
- Build a Thicker and Wider Back Most casual lifters don’t spend the same amount of time training their back then they do their chest and biceps. And that’s a big mistake if you want a proportional muscular body because an impressive wide and thick back..It increases your chest circumference measurements and gives you that “power” look from the side and back. [...]...
- 4 Easy Ways to Build Muscle No matter how you train using whatever methods and techniques to build muscle, the number one rule is to stay consistent with maintaining a high level of intensity. Unless you’re training at a high intensity level (over the long term), maximum muscular growth cannot be accomplished and you will not reach your potential for strength [...]...
- How to Train Your Forearms: Build a Crushing Grip A strong grip with beefy forearms allows you use pull, lift, haul, and push heavier weights on all exercises. A weak grip is also often a limiting factor in pulling heavy weights, as seen in the case of deadlifting for many lifters. It’s quite common nowadays to see a lifter being stuck at a certain [...]...
- Understanding the Principle of Progressive Overload to Build Muscle Mass Progression and progressive overload is one of the universal training principles. The human body is resistant to change. It is a homeostatic machine that needs a strong forceful push for change. That change might be to build more muscle mass, lose fat, gain strength and improve conditioning and fitness. photo credit: bobster855 If your goal is to [...]...