From opening doors to carrying groceries, we rely on our arm muscles for tons of daily tasks. So slotting in a quick biceps workout to smoke these important players is always a smart choice—especially since this muscle group can easily get neglected.
“Most of us probably need to strengthen our biceps,” Francine Delgado-Lugo, CPT, cofounder of Form Fitness Brooklyn, tells SELF. A big reason for that is because of all the time many folks spend sitting at keyboards or scrolling smartphones with their arms bent. This locks the biceps into a shortened position and doesn’t give the muscles the chance “to lengthen and contract as they ought to for optimal health and strengthening,” Delgado-Lugo explains. Basically, they often don’t get the opp to move through their full range of motion.
The solution: A quick-yet-effective biceps routine you can do as a standalone workout or tack onto your regular gym sessions to give your arms—specifically, your biceps, or the muscles along the fronts of your upper arms—the attention they deserve.
The below workout, which Delgado-Lugo created for SELF, does just that. With four dumbbell exercises that’ll ignite your upper arms, it’s “a full-on focus on the biceps,” she says. And you don’t need much time to squeeze this in: It takes about 10 minutes (plus or minus, depending your pace), making it a realistic addition to a busy routine.
First up in the workout is the bent-over row, a classic compound strength move. While the main driver here is your back (more specifically, your lats), your biceps play an important supporting role in helping to pull the weights toward you. Pulling exercises like this are super functional, since they mimic the way we actually use these muscles in everyday life, like by opening a door or bringing an object closer to us, Delgado-Lugo explains.
From there, you’ll tackle isolation exercises to really zero in on your upper arms. You’ll do three variations on the biceps curl: a traditional curl, a crossbody curl, and a concentration curl. Together, these three moves work both “heads,” or parts, of the biceps, which is key for building well-rounded biceps strength. (Your “short head” sits on the inside of your arm, and the “long head” lies on the outside.)
In particular, working the long head—which moves like the crossbody and concentration curl do—is important, since we tend to spend a lot of time holding the biceps in a shortened position, Delgado-Lugo says. Moreover, working the long head emphasizes the eccentric portion of a move—the part when the muscle is lengthening under load—which is a more effective way to improve strength, power, and speed performance compared to traditional resistance training, according to research. In other words, you get great bang-for-your-biceps-buck.
If you’re tackling this as a standalone workout, do it twice a week, Delgado-Lugo suggests. (And make sure to do a quick warm-up beforehand so that your muscles are properly primed; exercises like shoulder circles and arm swings can do the trick.) But if it’s getting tacked onto another workout? “Once a week is probably just fine,” she says.
