Hardest Bicep Workout

The hardest biceps workout will depend on your individual strength and the current fitness of your arm muscles. You can isolate your biceps with certain exercises, the difficulty of which also depends on the load, the duration of the exercise and your form. If you want a thorough and challenging workout, you need to condition your biceps from a variety of force angles. Take advanced workout hints from the experts, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, who have spent decades building their biceps to perfection.

  1. Increase 21s to 28s

    • The 21 curls exercise, which involves three stages of doing a biceps curl, blasts your arms and dramatically boosts endurance, notes the “Alpha Male Challenge: The 10-Week Plan to Burn Fat, Gain Muscle & Build True Alpha Attitude” by James Villepqigue and Rick Collins. Made popular by Arnold Schwarzenegger and other bodybuilders, this exercise can be modified to produce an even greater biceps pump. For 28s, you perform four variations of the biceps curl, using a barbell, dumbbells or an EZ bar. Begin by doing seven reps to only the first third to half of the curl’s range of motion. Perform the next seven reps at the full range of motion and then do an isometric hold for seven seconds at the midpoint of the curl. Do the last seven reps at a third to half of the end of the curl’s range of motion, or the easiest part of the exercise.

    Pump with a Band

    • A difficult biceps workout combines lifting heavy weight quickly and frequently. If you perform biceps curls with a super-strong resistance band, you’ll feel the blood pumping through your arm muscles. Work with a one-inch maximum strength band that’s looped. Step on the middle of the band with feet shoulder-width apart. If you widen your stance, you’ll increase the resistance. Grab the other end of the loop with both hands. You can choose any grip -- neutral, pronated or supinated. Your hands should align with your shoulders. Try to perform 60 biceps curls in 30 seconds for two to four sets. Take a one- to two-minute rest interval between sets.

    Follow the Oak

    • Called the “Oak,” Arnold Schwarzenegger would do an arms workout twice a week that lasted two hours. He spent 45 minutes on his biceps, focusing on four exercises: cheating barbell curl, incline dumbbell curl, one-arm concentration curl and standing alternate dumbbell curls. While the cheating barbell curl helps you to build mass, the incline curl enables you to extend your biceps to the very bottom of its range of movement. The one-arm concentration curl forces you to focus on form, and the standing alternate dumbbell curls blasts your arms as you try to touch your pinky finger to the outer head of the biceps. If you can match Schwarzenegger’s 20 to 26 sets between the four exercises, you’ve completed a hard biceps workout.

    Tips and Considerations

    • When performing biceps curls with an EZ bar or barbell, slip your thumb under the bar on the grip, which will put more stress on your biceps and less on your forearms. Because three times as many muscle fibers are activated on the downward phase of a weight training exercise, take your time on lowering the weights. The standard timing for each rep is one second on the rise and three seconds on the descent. If you’re looking to build muscle mass and can last more than eight reps on a biceps exercise, the weight is too light. Increase the weight and work your arms to muscle failure.