When it comes to getting the ultimate in bicep mass you need to do the standing barbell curl and the standing barbell cheat-curl exercises. The cheat curl is the use of a heavy weight that you can’t lift correctly so that you need to use the muscles of the upper body to ’swing’ the weight up, in other words cheating, but you can just cheat enough so that you are able to complete the curl. The biceps are forced to work maximally throughout the movement, when just cheating enough to complete the curl.
If you cheat too much and swing the weight most, or all of, the way up, then you are defeating the purpose of the exercise, which is to make those biceps work maximally, and get them used to heavier weights that can be used in strict barbell curls.
The biceps muscle has two muscular ‘heads’ which need to be trained in specific ways. The outer head is responsible for biceps peak, and you can check this in the following way: with your biceps of one arm contracted as in a front biceps pose, put a finger from your other hand on the peak of the muscle. Then, whilst still keeping your finger in position on the muscle, lower your arm to your side, and you will see that your finger is positioned on the outside of your biceps, on the outer head.
Some Effective outer head exercises would include concentration curls that curl inward toward the middle of the chest, narrow grip barbell, preacher curls and hammer curls. Hammer curls are carried out with dumbbells with the thumb facing upward throughout the movement, and should be done in a cross-body fashion so that the dumbbell is lifted across the body and ends up with the thumb uppermost and the dumbbell against the chest. Hammer curls are great too for brachialis development, which is the muscle that is found under the biceps and is visible between the biceps and triceps in a rear double biceps pose.
The are three heads in both of our triceps muscles being the inner, medial (or ‘lower’ triceps) and outer heads. A really good exercise to help improve our lower triceps is weighted dips and dips with the arms straightened three-quarters of the way, but still keeping tension on the triceps throughout the exercise. The outer triceps will respond to movements only with the hands in a ‘thumbs-up’ position. A few favorable exercises would be triceps pressdowns with a rope, dumbbell kickbacks, dips, one-arm cable and pressdowns with the palm facing up, but there are a lot more to chose from.
The inner triceps respond to movements in which the thumb is turned inward, and include lying or standing barbell triceps extensions, triceps pressdowns with a bar (palms facing down), one-arm cable pressdowns (palm downward), close grip bench presses, and many others.
It is important that the muscles of the arms are not over trained, since these muscles are used in workouts for other body parts, such as chest and back. The way in which workouts are constructed should have this in mind, such that chest and back workouts are separated by several days from direct arm workouts. In fact, the arms are probably best trained on their own in a single workout, or directly after shoulder work.
The amount of sets that are needed for arms to respond will differ in each person and can also depend on the intensity of the exercise and recovery time. This is something which you will have to experiment with until you start to see the right results.