Number one is standing barbell curls. Simply stand, keep your feet apart and your back straight, and use an underhand grip on the straight barbell or EZ bar. With the barbell hanging in front of you at arm’s length, start curling your biceps by bringing the barbell up to your shoulder area. This exercises both your biceps and your forearm muscles.
For maximum contraction force, hold the curl for a second or two before lowering the barbell back to starting position. Be sure not to lift excess weight and to use the momentum to bring the barbell to your shoulders fully. Repeat this as tolerated.
The second of the men’s bicep workouts is the variation of the barbell curls – the preacher curls. This utilizes a special preacher bench to isolate your biceps from the other muscle groups of your body.
How this works is you sit on the preacher bench and rest your arms facing up on the pad in front. Hold the barbell securely with both hands and then use nothing but your bicep power to curl up the barbell again up to the shoulder area. You will need a partner to hand you the barbells in this way. Using this variation gives the maximum weight bearing force to your bicep muscles and places the secondary force on your forearms – a great way of conditioning your biceps.
Another of these bicep workouts for men is the standing dumbbell curls. It isn’t principally different from using barbells but the variation of the weights allows for individual arm exercises.
Stand the way you do with the barbell curls and hold the dumbbells at the side of your body with your palms clenched sideways. Simultaneously or alternately curl up the dumbbells using only the forearms for movement until it reaches shoulder level. Your palms must be clenched facing up at this point. Hold this position to prolong maximum muscle contraction and then slowly lower after a second or two. As with the above exercises, repeat this movement as tolerated.
A variation of dumbbell curls is the hammer curls. They are essentially the same except for the fact that you do not rotate your palms to face upward when the dumbbells reach shoulder level for the hammer curls. This extends the weight for contraction to the brachialis muscles of the arms as well
One final variation of the dumbbell curls that we will enumerate in this article is the concentration curls. In this exercise, the biceps and forearms are isolated from the rest of the body muscles in much the same principle as with preacher curls.
This is done by sitting on a bench with legs apart and placing your curling elbow firmly braced against your corresponding knee. Curl the dumbbell up to shoulder level all the while keeping the elbow braced securely to the knee. Repeat this and alternate usage of arms as tolerated.
Whichever exercise you choose, it is important to note that they all need commitment and consistency and that not all of these exercises may work for everyone so a healthy combination and variation is advised. But with patience and hardwork, these bicep workouts will definitely pay off and make you a buffer man.
