If you’re anything like me, when you first started weight lifting, you were pretty taken aback by the sheer volume of different exercises you can do for each body part. It was pretty exciting – all these cool moves you could do with barbells, dumbbells, cables, bodyweight, elastic bands and even chains(!).

I don’t know about you, but I wanted to master them all right away and become a pro as quickly as possible.

After a while though, you learn how to train properly. You realise that you never need more than a handful of exercises per bodypart, often just one or two. You start to weed out the useless movements (*cough* tricep kickbacks*cough*) and focus on the stuff that really gets results.

You start asking yourself what is the “best exercise I can do to maximise my gains here?”

 

The Biceps

For it’s size, the bicep really receives an unfair amount of focus and attention. In a balanced physique, the bicep only makes up one third of the muscle on your upper arm, yet the bicep exercises available number in the hundreds.

There comes a point, especially if you’re on a short, sharp training regime like Max-OT or abbreviated training, where you really are just looking for the best bicep exercise to maximise your gains and minimise your time in the gym.

Well, without further ado, here it is - the best bicep exercise.

Before I tell you what it is, let me warn you: the average musclehead in the gym will disagree.

Read the explanation, however, and you’ll see why he’s wrong.

 

The best bicep exercise is…

…The Close Grip Chin-Up.

It might come as a shock. Here’s the reasoning.

 

• Close grip chins are a compound multi-joint exercise.

 

Compound exercises are universally recognised to be superior muscle builders to isolation exercises. They are also far and away the best choice for building raw strength.

Now, by definition, compounds work multiple muscle groups. As such, you have to take into account how much the muscle in question is working in the compound, compared to a relevant isolation exercise.

For example, on the bench press, you may find your triceps are worked less than in an overhead extension, even though the bench press is a betteroverall mass-builder.

This isn’t an issue with the close grip chin-up - you’ll find your biceps truly fatigued after three sets. The “close grip” actually shifts stress off the lats and onto your biceps. As a result they get a fairly intense workout.

 

 

• Close grip chins are a closed-chain exercise.

 

Closed-chain means that either you hands or your feet (in this case you hands) aren’t moving, while the rest of your body is moving through space. Other examples include barbell squats and dips.

Closed-chain exercises are proven to stimulate more muscle growth than other exercises. Your body simply takes them more seriously and initiates a greater growth response. If you want more information on this, check out an exercise scientist named Verkhoshansky – his book “Supertraining” is the authority on the subject.

 

 

• The bicep is worked hard all the way through the range of motion.

 

Consider the barbell curl for a second. Is the bicep working from the bottom of the lift to the top? Yes, but not evenly thoroughout. The bicep does most of the work mid-way through the curl, when your arm is furthest from your body (and if you’re into the physics of weight lifting, that’s where the torque is greatest).

At the bottom of the lift and at the top, the bicep is hardly working at all. And at the top of the lift, your bicep is pretty much relaxed, because the the bar is resting directly over your lower arm.

This is true for any other “curling” movement – dumbbells, barbells, cables and preachers. The mechanics of the curl remain the same.

Now consider the close grip chin. At every point in the lift, you’re working to lift your bodyweight. The stress on your biceps isn’t quite constant, but it’s pretty close to it – because the change in horizontal distance of your centre of gravity to bar is negligible compared to the large amount of weight you’re lifting in the chin-up.

Fortunately, if this is all a bit confusing, you can experience it first hand. Do a barbell curl, then a chin-up. Notice at the top of the barbell curl, your biceps pretty much relax. At the top of the chin-up, your biceps are still working just as hard. If you relax them, you drop down.

So what does this all mean?

The near-constant stress on the bicep through the full range of motion in the chin-up means that 1) you develop much higher levels of functional curling strength and 2) you stimulate a fair bit more muscle growth.

Combine this with the huge benefits of being a compound and closed-chain exercise, and it becomes clear that chinups really are the best bicep exercise.

 

Not convinced? Experiment!

It can be hard to believe that all those guys doing endless variations of curls in the gym are training their biceps inefficiently. Can chin-ups really be the best bicep exercise? Afterall, there are quite a few guys with pretty huge arms who only do cable curls and preachers.

I’m not saying standard curling doesn’t work, I’m just saying that you’ll build strength and muscle more quickly and more efficiently if you do chin-ups.

You can test this for yourself. Drop all your curling movements for a month, and switch to close grip chinups. Do 3 sets of 8-10 reps, twice per week. Stay 1-2 reps away from failure and add weight or reps each week. You can use a dip belt to add the weight.

In 6 weeks you’ll notice your biceps growing larger, fuller and stronger, gaining more quickly than you ever did with curls. Once you’ve realised the power of the best bicep exercise available, you’ll want to keep it as the centre piece of your bicep training. 

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