Concentration curl

The concentration curl is especially good for targeting your biceps and excluding all other muscles.
Be careful if you’ve had elbow injuries or are prone to lower back discomfort.

Getting set
Hold a dumbbell in your right hand, and sit on the edge of a bench or a chair with your feet a few inches wider than your hips. Lean forward from your hips, and place your right elbow against the inside of your right thigh, just behind your knee. The weight should hang down near the inside of your ankle. Place your left palm on top of your left thigh. See photo A.

The exercise
Bend your arm and curl the dumbbell almost up to your shoulder (see photo B), and then straighten your arm to lower the weight back down.

Do’s and don’ts

• DO bend forward from your hips instead of rounding your lower back to lean forward.
• DON’T lean away from your arm as you lift the weight up to help get better leverage. (Hey, that’s cheating!)

Other options

• Slant biceps curl: Sit on a bench with the back inclined a few inches. Lean back and curl the weight up. You can do this one hand at a time or with both hands together and with a twist as you curl upward or without a twist.
• Standing concentration curl: Hold a dumbbell in one hand. Stand alongside a flat bench, lean over, and place your other hand on top of bench. Let the arm holding the weight hang straight down to the floor. Bend your elbow so the weight moves up and in toward your armpit, and then slowly lower it back down.

Dumbbell reverse biceps curl

The dumbbell reverse biceps curl focuses on your biceps. Use caution if you have lower back or elbow problems.

Getting set
Hold a dumbbell in each hand with an overhand grip, and stand with your feet as wide as your hips. Let your arms hang down at your sides with your palms facing toward the back. See photo A. Pull your abdominals in, stand tall, and keep your knees relaxed.
The exercise
Curl your right arm close to your shoulder so your arm faces out away from your shoulder at the top of the movement. Slowly lower the dumbbell back down, and then repeat with your left arm. Continue alternating until you’ve completed the set. See photo B.

Do’s and don’ts

• DO keep your knees relaxed and your posture tall. This prevents you from swinging your body forward and back to help move the weight.
  
• DON’T swing your elbows out wide as you bend your arm to raise the weight. Keep your elbows close to your body without supporting them on the sides of your stomach for leverage.
• DON’T just let the weight fall back to the starting position. Lower it slowly and with control.

Other options

• Hammer curl: Instead of beginning with palms facing back, start with palms facing in and keep your palms facing in throughout the motion. Imagine that you’re pounding nails into a board with two large hammers. This version of the exercise puts more emphasis on your forearm muscles, as well as some of the muscles that reside underneath the biceps.
  
• Zottman curl (harder): Instead of beginning with palms facing back, begin with palms facing front with an underhand grip. As you curl your arm upward, rotate your palm in toward your body and bring it up and across to the opposite shoulder. This version of the dumbbell curl is slightly harder than the basic version.
• Seated biceps curl: If you find yourself cheating too much even with light weights, try sitting on a bench or a chair.

Barbell biceps curl

The barbell biceps curl targets your biceps.
Be especially careful if you have elbow problems. Whenever you add weight and bend a joint, it increases the stress to that joint. Therefore, if you have a weakened joint, you need to exercise extreme care not to overdo it and cause an injury. If you have lower back problems, you may want to choose a seated biceps exercise instead.

Getting set
Hold a barbell with an underhand grip and your hands about shoulder-width apart. Stand with your feet as wide as your hips, and let your arms hang down so the bar is in front of your thighs (see photo A of Figure 14-2). Stand up tall with your abdominals pulled in and knees relaxed.

The exercise
Bend your arms to curl the bar almost up to your shoulders , and then slowly lower the bar almost to the starting position.
Do’s and don’ts

• DO keep your knees relaxed. This protects your lower back.
• DON’T rock back and forth or lean way back to lift the weight. If you need to do that, you should be arrested for using too much weight.
  
• DON’T just straighten your arms and let the bar drop down to your thighs like a sack of rocks. Instead, lower the bar slowly to get the most muscle power from the exercise and to protect your elbows. And don’t lower the bar all the way back down because you lose tension on the muscle.

Other options

• Reverse-grip biceps curl (harder): Do the basic version of the barbell biceps curl holding the bar with an overhand grip. You feel this exercise more in your wrists. (Hint: Use a lighter weight for this version.)
• Cable biceps curl: Place the cable on the setting closest to the floor and attach a short or long straight bar. Hold the bar with an underhand grip and stand about a foot away from the cable tower. Curl the weight up and down exactly as in the basic version of the barbell biceps curl.
• Double biceps curl: Hold a dumbbell in each hand with your palms facing up, elbows resting lightly against your sides, and arms hanging down. Curl the dumbbells up and down together as if they were a barbell.

Avoiding Mistakes When Training Your Arms

Some people use such herky-jerky form when they perform arm exercises that they look like people dancing under a strobe light. Keep the following tips in mind when training your arms:

• Don’t cheat. If you contort your whole body to lift the weight, you work your whole body, not your arms. Rocking back and forth is also a great way to throw out your lower back. Think about how you’ll feel explaining to your friends that you wrenched your back while exercising your arms.
• Don’t skip your wrists. Few people pine away for forearms the size of Popeye’s.
• Go easy on the elbows. Exercise captions throughout this chapter tell you to straighten your arms. This, however, doesn’t mean snapping your elbows into a fully straightened position.
• Keep your elbows still. When your elbows veer out to the side during many biceps and triceps exercises, you’re able to lift more weight. However, this is only because you have more leverage; your arms aren’t getting any stronger. When you’re doing biceps exercises such as the dumbbell reverse biceps curl, you may also have a tendency to pull your arms and elbows forward to lift the weight. You can’t avoid this extra movement completely, but keep it to a minimum.

Enjoying Strong Arms

Because we use our arms so often in daily life, we tend to take our arm muscles for granted. However, giving these muscles extra attention in the weight room really does pay off.

• Attaining real-life benefits: Your arms are the link between your upper body and the rest of the world. If your arms are weak, your larger, upper body muscles can’t work to full capacity. You’re only as strong as your weakest link. For example, the lat pulldown, a back exercise, mainly requires back strength, but weak biceps limit your ability to do this exercise. With stronger triceps, you can more effectively challenge your chest muscles in exercises such as the push-up or the bench press. Strong wrists are crucial for many weight lifting exercises and for activities outside of the gym: gripping a golf club, shelling peanuts, shuffling cards, or working at your computer keyboard without pain.
• Preventing injury: Strong arms help protect your elbows from harm. Carry around a heavy briefcase with a straight arm long enough and eventually your elbow starts to ache. With stronger arm muscles, you can haul that briefcase around longer without pain, and you’re less likely to get tennis elbow, which is inflammation of the elbow joint. Powerful arms also minimize your chances of soreness or injuries when you perform weight lifting exercises or when you lift a dumbbell, barbell, or weight plate off of a rack. Strong wrists, in particular, help you avoid carpal tunnel syndrome. Repetitive movements such as typing, scanning items at the grocery checkout, or operating the mouse of your computer can cause this painful and sometimes debilitating condition.
• The confidence factor: The feel-good factor: We tend to equate toned biceps with masculine strength. Popeye’s biceps are almost the size of his head. In women, the jury is still out. Popular opinion can’t come to a consensus on whether it prefers women with toned arms or weak arms. The bottom line is that strong arms help you to enjoy life better and toned muscles look healthy. Society’s judgment about whether men and women should have big or small muscles is likely to change with the winds of fashion, but being healthy and strong and feeling great are always positive.

Understanding Arm Muscle Basics

Your biceps muscle spans the front of your upper arm. Hang out in any gym and you’ll see people flexing these muscles in the mirror, usually when they think that nobody’s watching. The main job of your biceps (nicknamed your is or your guns) is to bend your arm; in gymspeak, this motion is called curling or flexing.
Your triceps, located directly opposite your biceps, spans the rear of your upper arm. The biceps and triceps, like many muscle groups, work together in pairs. When you squeeze your biceps, your triceps relaxes and your arm bends, and when you squeeze your triceps, your biceps relaxes and your arm straightens. Maintaining a good balance of strength in the relationship between the two muscles is important so that one muscle doesn’t dominate the other. That’s why you need to train both.
Another group of arm muscles allows your wrists to move in a variety of ways. To spare you some jargon, we’re going to refer to these as your wrist muscles. These muscles let you bend your wrist up, arch it down, twirl it in a circle, tilt it left and right, and turn your palm up or down. One of the most important jobs of the wrist muscles is to keep the wrist stable and the wrist joint flat or neutral. If your wrists are weak, the wrist muscles can bend at inopportune times (like when you’re holding a 100-pound barbell over your chest). Weak wrists also mean that you can’t get a grip — on a baseball bat, a stubborn weed, or a can of mushroom soup — and leave you prone to conditions like carpal tunnel syndrome, an inflammation of your wrist nerves.

Shoulder press machine

The shoulder press machine is a good overall shoulder exercise because it challenges all of your shoulder muscles. It also works your triceps and upper back.
Take extra caution if you’re prone to neck, elbow, or lower back problems.

Getting set
Set your seat height so the machine’s pulley is even with the middle of your shoulder. Hold on to each of the front handles. (Your palms face each other.) Pull your abdominals in tight but leave a slight, natural gap between the small of your back and the seat pad. See photo A.

The exercise
Press the handles up without locking your elbows. Lower your arms until your elbows are slightly lower than your shoulders. See photo B.

Do’s and don’ts

• DO relax your shoulders and keep them well below your ears, especially while your arms are straightened fully.
• DON’T arch your back or wiggle around in an effort to lift the weight.
  
• DON’T thrust upward with more force than necessary; this strain puts a lot of stress on your elbows.

Other options
Many shoulder machines have arms that work “independently” of each other. That is, the left and right sides aren’t connected, so each arm handles its own share of the load. If your gym has this option, we recommend that you give it a try. You’ll get the structure and support that a machine has to offer but also develop balance and uniform strength as you would with free weights.