In the age of functional training and workouts designed to supposedly help us live longer, I’ve found that working on my biceps has weirdly become a sort of guilty pleasure. Do stronger biceps help me out in my daily life on Manhattan’s West Side? Maybe a little, but not really. Will they extend my stay in this mortal coil? Doubtful. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let the trend cycle influence my human right to exercise for aesthetic reasons. Sun’s out, guns out, baby.
Unless your job requires you to squeeze into an F1 cockpit, race a bicycle up Alpe d'Huez, or make Mike White happy, there’s no reason to train your biceps—but there’s no reason not to train your biceps, either. But surely you’d prefer to have a cut set of arms?
The best biceps exercises, according to trainers
Supinated-grip biceps curl
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The OG biceps curl is still one of the best exercises you can do to fill out your shirtsleeves. “‘Supinated grip’ just means you're performing the curl with your palms facing up,” says Luke Carlson, founder and CEO of Discover Strength. “This can be done with dumbbells, a barbell, or on a machine. Either way, the supinated-grip biceps curl is key.” That’s because, of all the biceps exercises, this one hits the muscle group most holistically. “The biceps does three things,” explains Carlson. “The first function is to supinate, or rotate outwards. That's actually the first role of the bicep, and very few people who lift weights are aware of that. The second is to cause flexion at the elbow, which is what we think about when we do a curl.” (The third is to bring the humerus forward—that is, raise your arm.) The supinated-grip biceps curl takes direct aim at the first two. “To maximize the biceps, we want to make sure we're supinating and then curling as well,” says Carlson. The supinated-grip biceps curl “accomplishes two of the major functions of the biceps, so it’s a wonderful exercise, because it mimics the exact kinesiological function of the biceps.”
How to do it:
- From a standing or seated position, hold a dumbbell in each hand, palms facing forward. (Alternatively, you could use a barbell.)
- Your arms should be almost completely straight at your sides, with just the slightest bend to protect your joints.
- From here, keeping your upper arms tight against your torso, curl your forearms up towards your shoulders.
- Similar to how you don’t want the weights to make it all the way to the bottom of the rep, stop an inch or two away from the top. “If we come too high, we actually take tension off the muscle,” says Carlson.
- Pause here for a second, and then slowly lower the weights with control to the starting position. That’s one rep.
Trainer tip:
You might have noticed some people at the gym rotating their grip as they curl the weights up, presumably in order to involve additional muscles. “They're essentially working on different areas of the biceps as they're playing around with the rotation of the forearm,” says Castrogaleas. The thing with this technique is, regardless of which way you’re rotating, you’re not hitting either set of muscles as directly as you would if you just picked one grip. “There’s no benefit to rotating as you curl up,” says Carlson. “There's also a lot of gym mythology about how, as you curl up, your pinky has to be above your index finger, and that's just not the case.”
You need to combine at least two exercises to properly build your biceps. Here are four more.
