How Often Should You Work Out Your Biceps?

Whether you’re looking to build big, bulky muscles or simply wish to tone without adding size, it can be a challenge to know exactly how often to workout your biceps. Having strong biceps is essential for enhancing your arm definition, limiting the potential for injuries, and maximizing your pulling power.  While biceps get a lot of attention outside the gym whenever you bend your arms or lift items, it’s still important to target these muscles for meeting your fitness goals. As always, you should consult with your physician before beginning any new exercise regimen, but the following article will cover the typical schedule for sculpting your biceps.

Typical Fitness Recommendations

For the health and physical fitness benefits you seek from weight training, the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) has recommended that you work out each muscle group at least two times per week on non-consecutive days. More frequent training may elicit slightly better muscle gains, but this will be relatively small.

It’s suggested that individuals perform a minimum of eight exercises that train the body’s major muscle groups for best results. Workouts should be less than one hour total because longer exercise times usually lead to unsuccessful dropouts.

Avoiding Overtraining

New lifters tend to make the peril mistake of trying to maximize their strength by training every single day, but this ends up being counterproductive. It’s essential that you don’t overtrain because your body needs the recovery time to rebuild the microscopic tears in your muscles with stronger fibers to effectively strengthen.

Despite popular belief, progress will actually be made during your recuperation period between workouts. That’s why you should wait at least two days between each biceps workout for the fullest recovery that will maximize gains. Although you may become impatient with this much wait time, remain slow and steady to ensure you don’t eventually plateau or injure your biceps.

Improving Your Arm Strength

Chances are that one of your goals from working out your biceps is to improve your arm strength. If you’re looking to build stronger biceps, you’ll need to ensure you’re also hitting the recommended number of sets and repetitions to do so. It’s advised that weight lifters perform two to six sets per bicep for no more than six repetitions.

Make sure you’re giving your biceps proper rest time for two to five minutes so that you’ll be able to continue lifting heavy. Whenever you feel six reps isn’t enough, you’ll likely need to lift heavier weights and adequately challenge your muscles. In general, strength-training your biceps should only occur once weekly.

Building Big Bicep Muscles

e enlarging muscles from exercise. Bodybuilders are well-known for training to have big, well-defined biceps, but most athletes benefit from adding muscle size.

For this, you’ll need to perform around three to six sets per bicep for six to 12 repetitions with 90 second breaks in between to see the large muscle growth you desire. Choose a weight that will allow you to
successfully perform this number of repetitions, but don’t forget to challenge yourself. You should only do this workout routine once weekly too, so prepared to devote time and consistent effort for building size.

Enhancing Your Muscular Endurance

If you’re looking to tone their muscles without adding size, you’ll train to acquire improved muscular endurance. This refers to the enhanced ability for your biceps to contract repeatedly for sculpting away any traces of jiggle. For muscular endurance, you should plan to perform one to three sets per bicep for between 12 and 20 repetitions.

Rest periods should be relatively short and last under 30 seconds each to keep your muscles contracting. You should choose a lighter weight than you would lift for strength training or muscular hypertrophy, but don’t be afraid to challenge yourself. When you can do more than 20 repetitions, it’s time to boost your weight.

Adding Variety into Your Workout

No matter how many reps you do to achieve your specific goals, it’s essential that you keep your bicep muscles guessing. This is the most effective method for avoiding any plateaus that may dwindle your motivation. You should perform different bicep exercises and in a different order during every workout session. Biceps are used in both compound exercises, such as pull-ups and seated rows, and isolation exercises, including preacher and barbell curls. Adding compound exercises into your total-body workout will make efficient use of your gym membership and create moderate muscular gains.

For developing huge “guns,” you should consider a split cycle in which you complete isolation exercises after doing the compound workouts. It’s clear that barbell curls reign supreme for building muscle mass, but simply switching your grip can adequately hit different biceps muscle groups for better results. Vary your grip options to change the angle of stress placed on your biceps to continually stimulate gains.

Overall, there may not be one simple answer for how often you should workout your biceps because it will vary based on your specific fitness objectives. That being said, don’t push yourself too hard with overtraining more than twice each week. All of the aforementioned information has been general guidelines for weightlifting. You should always consult with a personal trainer or other fitness professional for designing the workout plan that works best for your body.

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