Apart from abs, biceps are the one muscle most men covet the most. Who doesn’t want large baseball-like biceps, especially when you’re walking down a dark alley? It’s no surprise that men have nicknamed the muscles as ‘guns’. If you don’t have a pair of guns on you, well, who are you? At least that’s the feeling around most people with a Y chromosome.
For women, although they don’t want big arms, they do what slim and firm upper arms. So the bicep is usually of importance to females as well.
Believe it or not, biceps are not the biggest muscle on your upper arm. The biggest muscle is the tricep (called ‘tri’ because it has 3 different heads - or to put it simply, sticks out in 3 different ways! The tricep is approximately twice the size of the bicep muscle. That means if you solely focus on building up your biceps and neglect your triceps you’re missing out on 2/3 of the muscle gain you could be enjoying! Your arms will never look as hard and muscular as they could be if all you’re doing is dumbbell curls and the like.
Having said that, let’s focus on biceps for this article. These are the muscles that are visible front on and are usually the first muscles teenage boys will try and increase in size.
Initially, Biceps Are An Easy Muscle To Grow
Biceps tend to be one of the easiest muscle groups to build. If you’ve never done any weights before and you start doing dumbbell curls a few times a week you’ll be able to notice changes in just a few weeks. If you keep increasing the weights then this size will keep increasing.
Biceps Can Only Get So Big
I am not a bodybuilder and I have never (and never will) use steroids to get bigger. So putting steroids to the side, what most people find when they pick up dumbbells is that they’ll make great progress for the first month or so until they hit a plateau. Then they get discouraged because they can’t find any way to get past this plateau.
The problem is (usually) not to do with their training methods or diet, but simply they have reached the physical limit. Compare it to a letterbox. You can have a letterbox any size or weight you want, but only if the post that holds it up can take that weight/size. In this case your biceps are the letterbox, you can get them bigger until they reach the maximum for the rest of your body’s frame. The only way to get your biceps bigger from this point, is to make your entire frame bigger. That’s why I put such a high value on bang-for-buck exercises, they keep addressing your entire frame, not just one part.
My point is, if all you’re going to do is focus on your biceps, you’ll only ever make average gains
To really change the way your arms look you’re going to have to focus on the other muscles in your body too (including your leg muscles). Remember if you want to make any significant progress, you should be treating your body like a house. If you want your house to look good and to last for the long run, you have to build it the right way and not simply focus on one or two parts (e.g. abs and biceps)!
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